How does marriage demand stimulate support for immigration in Asia?

ABSTRACT

The previous literature suggests that citizens calculate the benefits of immigrants by assessing their impact on economic prospects. This paper argues that a type of social demand–the demand for marriage–also induces support for more liberal immigration policies. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,000 adults in China, where the population faces a shortage of women in the marriage market. The respondents were assigned to four groups, namely, a control group, a group with low-skilled worker shortage cues, a group with high-skilled worker shortage cues, and a group with marriage market crisis cues. We found that the marriage crisis treatment was effective to male respondents but not to female respondents. A supplementary examination of cross-national survey data showed that a gender imbalance at birth can elicit citizens’ higher support for immigration in 13 Asian countries/regions. The results show that, other than economic considerations, citizens’ concerns about marriage market competition can also stimulate immigration support.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration support
• marriage
• China
• Asia
• public opinion on immigration

Acknowledgments

The authors thank editors and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. The author also appreciate the generous help from Dimitar Gueorguiev for setting up the survey and the comments from the participants of the 2021 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting Panel and the Conference of Public Governance under the Global Risks at Xiamen University. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the 2019 International Migration Report from the United Nations at https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/InternationalMigration2019_Report.pdf

2 https://bit.ly/386aBUh, accessed on 01-02-2021

3 See: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/202105/t20210510_1817180.html; accessed on 07-31-2021

4 https://bit.ly/3uzKluY, accessed on 02-26-2021

5 https://bit.ly/3pWCtzV, https://bit.ly/3qSWKaW, accessed on 02-26-2021

6 See a report from the South China Morning Post at https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2177493/how-chinas-massive-gender-imbalance-driving-surge-southeast (accessed on February 21, 2021).

7 https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Asia-s-gender-imbalance-is-bad-news-for-growth (accessed on February 21, 2021) and https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/asias-gender-imbalance (accessed on February 22, 2021)

8 See the website http://www.wwe919.com/zuixinxiaoxi/1147.html (in Chinese, accessed on July 24, 2021).

9 See an example: https://www.zhihu.com/question/41605276 (in Chinese, accessed on July 24, 2021)

10 See the article from Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/26/decoder-asias-bride-market-wives-south-korea-singapore-china-vietnam/ (accessed on July 26, 2021) and articles from the South China Morning Post: https://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1354390/illegal-chinese-cross-border-matchmakers-flourish-demand-grows (accessed on July 26, 2021)

11 https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3014670/africa-and-across-asia-students-follow-belt-and-road-map, accessed on 02-14-2021.

12 https://bit.ly/35I6v3f, accessed on 01-15-2021.

13 See https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3019034/china-relaxes-immigration-rules-attract-and-retain-more-highly

14 The company asked to remain anonymous. The design is approved for human subject research ethnical review by the Institutional Review Board of a Major Research University (Ref. 16-033)

15 Additionally, see https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/04/23/only-men-need-apply/gender-discrimination-job-advertisements-china, accessed on 01-17-2021.

16 The list of countries is available in the Online Appendix.

17 The question concerning immigration attitudes was not asked in Indonesia.

18 All such data were collected from the World Bank, except for Taiwan, whose data were collected from its government website because the World Bank dataset does not show Taiwan as a separate entity. For the World Bank data, see https://data.worldbank.org/. For the data on Taiwan, see https://statis.moi.gov.tw/micst/stmain.jsp?sys=220&ym=10811&ymt=10911&kind=21&type=1&funid=c0120101&cycle=41&outmode=0&compmode=0&outkind=1&fldspc=0,7,&cod00=1&rdm=adnfbwhk.

19 Two additional notes are as follows. For the data that is not released every year, the data in the year closest to the survey year was used. Additionally, China’s country-level data were from 2015.

20 The data were from the World Bank, except for Taiwan, whose data came from the government of Taiwan.

21 For example, see https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Asia-s-gender-imbalance-is-bad-news-for-growth (accessed on January 7, 2021).

22 Check the Appendix for a detailed list of each control variable and how it is calculated.

23 The ordered logit regressions have similar results. See the Online Appendix for details.