Can social sentiment affect spouse-based immigration?

ABSTRACT

This article studies the effect of social sentiment on spouse-based immigration in the US using data on 27 origin countries from 1996 to 2013. We find that the number of immigrant spouses from a foreign country to the US is directly correlated with this country’s popularity among Americans.

KEYWORDS:

• Social sentiment
• country popularity
• spouse-based immigration
• immigrant spouses

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F22
• J10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See Altonji and Blank (1999) and Levitt (2004) for labour discrimination. See Hong and Kacperczyk (2009), Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2009) and Hwang (2011) for stock investment. Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2009) also examine trade and foreign direct investment.

² See, for example, Sjaastad (1962) and Clark, Hatton, and Williamson (2007).

³ Becker (1973) argues that marriage is positively correlated with a couple’s relative wage gap but negatively correlated with differences in skin colour and ethnic origin.

⁴ The 2014 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics shows that 990,553 people obtained lawful permanent residency in 2013, and 248,332 of them applied as spouses.

⁵ See Hwang (2011) for a detailed discussion.

⁶ Using adjustments of status as the immigration measure does not change our main conclusion.

⁷ We extract Taiwanese data from the 2014 World Economic Outlook Database.

⁸ The inclusion of fixed-effects noticeably reduces the estimates, indicating that popularity scores are rather stable over time despite occasional large swings. This further validates the cross-sectional analysis in Section 2.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank California State University Los Angeles for financial support, and Amy Mahler, Zhangjie Pei and Matthew Shade for research assistance.