Media exposure and illegal immigration: Evidence on attitudes from the U.S. Giovanni Facchini Essex,

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Media exposure and illegal immigration Evidence
on attitudes from the U.S.Giovanni Facchini
(Essex, Milan LdA)Anna Maria Mayda (Georgetown
LdA)Riccardo Puglisi (ECARES)

• Anna Maria Mayda
• INSIDE workshop
• Barcelona, July 2, 2008

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• Motivation
• Voters' attitudes are likely to represent a key
  factor in explaining policy outcomes (Rodrik
  1995).
• Immigration is one of the most salient policy
  issues in the current debate within developed
  countries. Gallup polls show that, in the U.S.,
  in May 2006 and May 2007, immigration was
  considered the second most important problem
  facing the country, with 13 and 24 of
  respondents mentioning it, respectively.
• In addition, there is growing evidence of a link
  between voters' preferences towards immigration
  and the restrictive immigration policies adopted
  by a large majority of destination countries
  (Facchini and Mayda 2008).

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• Outline
• Literature
• What we do
• The data
• Preliminary results
• Conclusions and open issues

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• Literature
• Literature on attitudes towards immigration
• Labor-market channel Kessler 2001, Scheve and
  Slaughter 2001, Mayda 2006, ORourke and Sinnott
  2005
• Welfare-state channel Hanson, Scheve and
  Slaughter 2007, Hanson 2005, Facchini Mayda
  2007, Dustmann and Preston 2006, 2007
• Other papers Facchini and Mayda 2008, Mayda
  2008, Hainmueller and Hiscox 2006, etc.
• Literature on illegal immigration Hanson 2006,
  Hanson and Spilimbergo 1999, Hanson and
  Spilimbergo 2001.
• Literature on media exposure McCombs and Shaw
  1972, McCombs 2002, Gerber, Karlan, and Bergan
  2008, DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007.

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• What we do
• In general, what is the impact of economic and
  cultural determinants on individual attitudes
  towards immigrants? (using a very large, new
  survey data set)
• In particular, what are the drivers of individual
  attitudes towards illegal immigrants?
• Furthermore, what is the role played by exposure
  to the mass media? Our ambition is to distinguish
  between two different hypotheses influence vs.
  self-selection.

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• The CCES data
• Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES)
  cross-sectional survey data, collected before the
  2006 midterm elections.
• Data collected on the internet, instead of phone
  or live interviews a weighting algorithm used to
  control for selection bias.
• Question about whether respondent would vote in
  favor of the Senate (more lenient) plan on
  illegal immigration main characteristic of this
  plan is the presence of a path to citizenship for
  illegal immigrants.
• Additional question about whether respondent
  prefers House (more stringent) or Senate (more
  lenient) plan on illegal immigration crucial
  difference is the lack/presence of a path to
  citizenship.
• Question on most frequently watched TV evening
  news programme ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, PBS,
  NBC, MSNBC.
• Demographic, economic and political controls
  (party id, ideology, etc.)

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• Main question we analyze
• Another issue is illegal immigration. One plan
  considered by the Senate would offer illegal
  immigrants who already live in the U.S. more
  opportunities to become legal citizens.
• Some politicians argue that people who have
  worked hard in jobs that the economy depends on
  should be offered the chance to live here
  legally. Other politicians argue that the plan is
  an amnesty that rewards people who have broken
  the law.
• What do you think? If you were faced with this
  decision, would you vote for or against this
  proposal?

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• Additional question we analyze
• Congress has been debating different policies
  concerning immigration reform.
• The Senate proposal has a path to citizenship
  for illegal immigrants. The House proposal, on
  the other hand, contains stricter enforcement and
  deportations of undocumented aliens.
• Which of these two items of reform do you think
  is more important?

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• The specification
• Probit regressions, excluding respondents who are
  immigrants.
• Standard errors are clustered at the state level.
• What is the impact of economic determinants on
  attitudes?
• Controlling for demographic and economic
  variables, ideology and party id, what is the
  correlation of individual attitudes with media
  exposure?
• What is the role played by the fraction of
  illegal immigrants for each state, as of the 2000
  Census?
• Omitted variable bias illegal immigrants going
  to friendly states instrument fraction of
  illegal immigrants with distance from Mexico and
  population size. However, issues with this
  instrument.

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• Main results
• Individuals are favorable to the Senate (more
  lenient) plan if they are more educated and more
  liberal. Income has an insignificant impact.
• Individuals watching Fox News are much less
  likely to favor the Senate plan. Weaker effect
  but same direction for CNN viewers. Opposite
  effect for PBS viewers.
• Individuals living in states with larger
  fractions of illegal immigrants are more
  favorable to the Senate (more lenient) plan.

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• Open issues
• Is there a proper instrument for media exposure?
• We would like to merge the CCES data with
  information on whether Fox News is available in
  the zip code/county of the respondent at the time
  of the survey (as in DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007).
• We have used information on whether the
  respondent has cable or satellite TV as an
  instrument for whether the individual watches Fox
  News. Our results are robust (larger in absolute
  value).