Dissertation
Migration as Municipal Management: The Political Effects of Venezuelan Migration in Colombia
How does migrant reception affect local political dynamics in Latin America? Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I examine the effects of receiving Venezuelan migrants on local candidate incentives in 820 municipalities in Colombia. I find that shock of location on a migrant route leads to an increase in party fragmentation. To explore the mechanisms, I conduct text analysis on political platforms of mayoral candidates and draw on over 100 interviews with candidates, government officials, and host citizens. The analysis reveals that party fragmentation results from citizen dissatisfaction with the perceived effects of unincorporated migrants on local services and public order. This paper makes two contributions: it argues that quality and availability of city services, and not exclusively anti-migrant attitudes, is salient in settings with resource scarcity, and that migrant reception can create alternative political opportunities beyond gains for right-wing ideologies in contexts without strong parties.
Click to download the Working Paper
Publications & Ongoing Work
-
Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) at UC San Diego, 2021
Refugee resettlement has been highlighted by advocates and multiple presidential administrations—both Democratic and Republican—as in line with the United States’ core humanitarian values and enriching the country economically, socially, and culturally. Yet refugee resettlement in recent years has become a flashpoint of often partisan resistance by politicians at the national, state, and local level. With the increased prominence for citizen groups and local officials in the resettlement process, there is a need to understand the impacts of refugees on towns, cities, and local government. We quantitatively examine the impacts of refugee resettlement on city and state finances and welfare provision in the US, using data from the American Community Survey, local and state budgetary data from the Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances and refugee resettlement data from U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). Using OLS regression models with two-way fixed-effects, we find that refugees have no statistically significant impact on local or state finances in the short and long-term, and we use a qualitative case study of refugee resettlement in Virginia provides further insights into these findings.
Paper: https://usipc.ucsd.edu/publications/usipc-fiscal-impact-refugee-resettlement.pdf
-
How does service delivery affect social cohesion between refugees and host communities? In what ways does this vary by sector, and by real and perceived levels of scarcity within sectors? How do service delivery shocks such as a pandemic impact social cohesion?
In refugee-hosting localities, competition over resources has been shown to worsen inter-communal social cohesion and create resentment (Lopez et al. 2011; Zhou 2019). There is nevertheless limited evidence on how inequalities in public goods can shape attitudes towards refugee inclusion in different communities.
Our paper utilizes observational data and a planned original phone survey of refugees and host community members in Colombia and Jordan analyze how changes in perceptions of access to and quality of services across sectors affect host citizen attitudes towards refugees in localities in Colombia and Jordan. We theorize that host communities that have higher quality public goods and services will be more exclusionary towards refugees through a phenomenon we term "service protectiveness."
-
Many public policies create (perceived) winners and losers, but there is little evidence on whether redistribution can support new political economy equilibria that raise aggregate welfare. We study an Ugandan policy that redistributes 30% of foreign aid for refugees to Ugandans while allowing refugees to work and move freely. We randomly distribute cash grants labeled as aid shared from the refugee response and find that they substantially increase support for policies facilitating refugees' integration. Sharing information about public goods funded by the refugee response has smaller, though still significant, effects. Impacts persist for at least two years and appear to work through changing beliefs about the economic effects of refugees. We find minimal impacts of intergroup contact, implemented as business mentorship by an experienced refugee. Overall, our results suggest that economic interventions can shape policy views when the connection between the policy and the compensation is salient.
-
What shapes the participation in the labor market, in public life, in leadership of women migrants in Colombia?
Studies have identified lower wages and lower participation in the labor market for Venezuelan women compared to migrant men and their Colombian women counterparts. In spite of progressive and integration-oriented policies that allow migrants to access work, the vast majority of migrant women are in the informal economy.
In this project, we examine the barriers to participation in the labor market, including systemic barriers including access to documentation and regular status, psychosociological barriers including perceptions of gender roles, and the inequalities of the “care economy.” We collect this data from interviews with migrant women leaders, focus group discussions with migrant women and Colombian women.