Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation

This article investigates why Americans who move have lower voter turnout than those who stay put. Two hypotheses are drawn from the political science literature. One emphasizes the need to register at one's new address in order to vote. The other locates the cause of lower turnout in the disruption of social connections that results from moving. By distinguishing those who change residences within their communities from those who move outside of their communities, I test the hypotheses. The findings show that both types of moves affect turnout. However, changing residences appears to be more important than changing communitites. Thus it appears that the explanation for the relationship between moving and turnout derives more from the need to register after moving than the disruption of social ties.     

Residential Mobility and Turnout: The Relevance of Social Costs,Timing and Education

Residential mobility has substantial negative effects on voter turnout. However, existing studies have been unable to disentangle whether this is due to social costs, informational costs or convenience costs that are related to re-registration. This article analyzes the relevance of the different costs by studying the effect of moving and reassignment to a new polling station in an automatic registration context and using a register-based panel dataset with validated turnout for 2.1 million citizens. The negative effect of moving on turnout does not differ substantially depending on the distance moved from the old neighborhood and it does not matter if citizens change municipality. Thus, the disruption of social ties is the main explanation for the negative effect of moving on turnout. Furthermore, the timing of residential mobility is important as the effect on turnout declines quickly after settling down. This illustrates that large events in citizens’ everyday life close to Election Day can distract them from going to the polling station. Finally, residential mobility mostly affects the turnout of less educated citizens. Consequentially, residential mobility increases inequalities in voter participation, which can be viewed as a democratic problem.     

The Moral Community and Immigration

In “Which American Dream Do You Mean?” David Stoll never justified his assumption that Guatemalans who want to immigrate to America have a moral claim on our attention. The “conversation” he describes really involves only Americans as only they are held responsible for immigration. Some advocates justify immigration on the basis of rights while others appeal to compassion, but both assign all responsibility to rich Americans and none to the sending societies. A huge moral asymmetry separates the West, which is assumed capable of achieving civic values from the non-West, which is not. Americans hunger for a more candid conversation about how to distribute the responsibility for immigration. That is essential to legitimizing immigration policy and preserving the civic character of American society.     

Immigration Benefits America

David Stoll suggests that because contemporary immigrants are non-European, uneducated, poor, and uninterested in joining the moral community of American society, their presence threatens national unity, obscures citizens’ obligations to one another and will shortly change the US into a minority–majority society. Drawing from historical accounts and statistical evidence, this article asserts that immigrants provide American society with social, economic and demographic benefits. Moreover, while pundits have long predicted that immigrants with national origins distinct from those of natives will transform American life to its detriment, the record reveals the US has been able to incorporate diverse nationalities to the benefit of immigrants and the native-born alike.

Immigration after 1992

"This paper outlines European trends in immigration and national policy regimes, focusing in particular on the social rights of established immigrants; part three looks at recent European transnational measures--mostly inspired by the 1992 initiative. Finally some of the implications of 1992 for immigrants in Europe are explored."     

Skill Specificity and Attitudes toward Immigration

Labor market competition theories explaining anti‐immigrant attitudes have received limited or no empirical validation in recent literature. This has led researchers to highlight education and cultural values as the main, if not the sole, drivers of attitudes toward immigration. We present a new labor market competition theory focusing on job availability rather than foreign labor supply. This theory predicts that individuals with low transferable skills in the labor market will articulate a subjective sense of job insecurity and higher hostility toward migrants. Our cross‐classified, longitudinal, and difference‐in‐differences models reveal that skill specificity is a strong driver of anti‐immigrant attitudes, and they suggest that economic competition theories cannot be dismissed. By shifting the attention from supply to demand in the labor market, and from actual to potential competition with migrants, we show that the highly educated are far from immune to anti‐immigrant attitudes.     

Immigration Enforcement and Children's Living Arrangements

Tougher immigration enforcement was responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone—many of them were fathers of American children. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in the escalation of interior immigration enforcement to assess its impact on the structure of families to which many of the deported fathers of U.S.‐born children belonged. We find that the average increase in immigration enforcement during the 2005 to 2015 period has raised by 19 percent the likelihood that Hispanic U.S.‐born children might live without their parents in households headed by naturalized relatives or friends unthreatened by deportation. Likewise, the same increase in immigration enforcement has raised by 20 percent these children's propensity to live with likely undocumented mothers who report their spouses as being absent—a reasonable finding given that most children with a likely undocumented father have undocumented mothers. Given the negative consequences of being raised by a single parent or without parents, plus the parallel increase in interior immigration enforcement, gaining a better understanding of the collateral damage of heightened enforcement on the families to which these children belong is well warranted.     

Open Immigration Policies and Liberal Discomfort

Consequentialist cosmopolitanism, Peter Higgins argues, enables closed border liberals to evade charges of moral hypocrisy despite their commitment to moral equality of individuals, once we recognize that open border arguments rely on cosmopolitanism’s individualism requirement, which ignores social realities relevant to a realistic assessment of the social consequences of an open immigration policy. Higgins is mistaken, however, in contending that cosmopolitan individualism entails attention to people only in their capacity as the abstract atomic individuals populating Charles Mills’ idealized social ontologies. Conversely, if cosmopolitan individualism does compel us to think of people as abstract atomic individuals, we are not obliged to think of them as relatively privileged. Under liberal cosmopolitanism, however, which prohibits state discrimination between citizens and non-citizens, open border policies are subject to no such consequentialist objections.

The Ethics of Immigration

This review essay examines recent work in political theory on the ethics of immigration admissions. It considers arguments put forward by Michael Walzer, Peter Meilaender and David Miller, among others, for state control of borders. Such arguments tend to appeal to the value of political communities and/or the exclusion rights of democratic associations, and I argue that neither of these are successful. Turning to work by Joseph Carens, Phillip Cole, Michael Dummett and others who advocate open or much more open borders, the article considers various arguments that would support this stance, including appeals to freedom of movement, utilitarianism and social justice. I argue that rights to immigration need embedding in global principles of resource redistribution. In the conclusion I sketch a cosmopolitan approach to immigration by which impartial criteria such as population density and gross domestic product would determine how many migrants states have a duty to admit.     

The Politics of Immigration and Public Health

The Conservative party's recent proposal to introduce compulsory medical examinations for immigrants should it win the upcoming election marks a departure in the politics of immigration and public health. For many years, the public health impact of immigration was kept out of party competition and successive governments pursued a voluntaristic approach to health checks. In this article, I outline the political history of immigration and public health, and consider the implications of attempts to raise the subject onto the public agenda. I argue that recent developments militate against a calm and balanced approach to the genuine public health concerns associated with immigration, which threatens not only to stigmatise immigrants and stoke anti-immigrant popular opinion, but also prevent the development of effective policies. In particular, the introduction of compulsory examinations may create perverse incentives for migrants to circumvent legal channels and thereby actually increase public health risks.     

Open Borders and the Right to Immigration

I do not argue for or against substantive immigration policies in this paper. Rather, my thesis concerns what kinds of reasons are morally salient in the construction of just immigration policies. I argue that philosophical proposals for regulating immigration should be evaluated according to the following methodological principle: The unit of analysis in terms of which principles for regulating immigration must be evaluated is the socially situated individual. I defend this principle indirectly by applying it to cosmopolitan principles for regulating immigration in order to demonstrate the moral inadequacy of theories of immigration that adopt an inappropriate unit of analysis. Failure to evaluate the moral adequacy of their own substantive proposals in terms of their effects on socially situated individuals leads some cosmopolitans to endorse substantive recommendations for regulating immigration (namely, open borders) that, I argue, disproportionately burden members of institutionally disadvantaged groups.

Immigration,redistribution, and universal suffrage

The effect of immigration on redistribution has been widely debated. This paper contributes to this debate by testing two explanations, which are that (i) immigration tends to reduce redistribution due to people’s higher levels of xenophobia, and that (ii) immigration affects redistribution because immigrants do not have the right to vote. Since the demand for redistribution depends on the (expected) gap between median voter income and mean income, immigrants affect the demand for redistribution because, as non-citizens, they do not change the median voter’s income, but, as economic stakeholders, they do affect the mean income. Four empirical consequences of (i) and (ii) are tested at the individual level. Evidence from the European Values Survey in 45 countries confirms (ii), showing that immigrants’ expected competitiveness on the labor market affects preferences for redistribution and that it is amplified when the perceived number of immigrants is high. In contrast, (i) is globally rejected since the impact of the citizens’ declared level of solidarity with immigrants tends to be weak and depends on the type of measurement or specification used.     

Regionalist Party Mobilisation on Immigration

This article explores the various ways in which regionalist parties approach the issue of immigration. Drawing on several cases, it compares how regionalist parties ‘construct’ the territory and how issues of diversity and immigration inform their policy goals. It is shown that mobilisation on immigration varies across regions. Whilst parties in Scotland and Catalonia have encouraged immigration as a way of expanding national membership and bolstering the labour market, those in Bavaria and Northern Italy have viewed immigration as a threat to their culture and economy. This article identifies factors influencing party immigration policies, including party ideology, local party competition, central government policy and other state-wide influences. It also assesses the extent to which European integration has influenced parties' territorial projects, in particular whether parties have responded to pressures to adopt EU norms and common principles, such as diversity and multiculturalism, in order to be perceived as credible.