“Do Interest Groups Affect US Immigration Policy?”, 2011-09 ():
We construct a dataset on lobbying expenditures to influence migration policy.
We find that lobbying affects the allocation of work visas across sectors.
More visas are allocated to sectors in which business interest groups lobby more.
Fewer visas are allocated to sectors where labor unions are more important.
While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue.
In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration.
We find robust evidence that both pro & anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically-significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration policy across sectors.
Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobbying expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.
[Keywords: immigration, immigration policy, interest groups, political economy]