The political economy of immigration

This dissertation studies different issues of the political economy of immigration. Chapter 1 studies whether the empirically higher fertility of immigrants could help explain political support of immigration by a majority of native young workers in overlapping generation models with production and capital accumulation. Immigration represents a dynamic trade-off for native workers as more immigrants decrease current wages but for sufficiently high fertility rates of immigrants, inflows of immigration can increase the future return on savings, in which case there is political support for immigration. Different games are considered and it is found that these policies can be politically sustainable, and they imply redistribution of welfare across generations.;Chapter 2 studies how intergenerational mobility can shape the politically-chosen equilibrium immigration policy when individuals care about the mobility opportunities of their children. The model is consistent with the fact that in the US immigration flows are concentrated toward the extremes of the skill distribution (very unskilled and very skilled people). Time equilibrium concept used is Markov perfect. Empirically we find that children of immigrants seem to be more "successful" than children of natives, and the model shows that this factor can be important for the political support of unskilled immigration. If guest worker programs are available, the medium-skilled voter chooses the guest worker program for unskilled workers, and full immigration for skilled ones, with no immigration/guest worker for medium-skilled workers.;The final chapter studies how the political decisions over redistribution and immigration are constrained by each other in a stylized general equilibrium model with a distribution of worker types and interdependent wages. The tax rate chosen by the median voter decreases under exogenous flows of lower-than-median-skill groups, while the effects of immigration with skill above the median voter depend on the specific parameterization. When voting over immigration with exogenous taxes, a high tax rate would constrain the immigration of low skilled individuals, with opposite effects under a low tax rate. Finally, when the choice is over both immigration and redistribution, the pool of unskilled immigrants would dictate the type of regime: high immigration/low taxation or low immigration/high taxation.