Abstract
Unwrapping the political discourse against immigration is key to understanding the rise of populism in Western democracies. A growing body of literature has found ample evidence that immigration pays a premium to conservative political forces that propose tighter policies. Using data on presidential elections in Spain from 2008 to 2019, we shed light on this debate by highlighting the role played by irregular migration. Some studies show that undocumented immigrants consume less and earn lower wages than documented immigrants with similar observable characteristics. In addition, since they are relegated to working in the informal sector, they cannot contribute to the welfare state with direct taxes. This suggests that undocumented migration might intensify support for right-wing politics and that the effect is independent from the one caused by the presence of documented migrants. We apply an instrumental variable strategy to deal with the non-random distribution of migrants across political districts. Our findings indicate that increasing undocumented migration increases support for the right, while increasing documented migration rises support for the left. When we consider the irruption of the far-right into electoral competitions, we find that undocumented migration redistributes votes from the left to the right, as has been observed in other countries.
Highlights
Unwrapping the political discourse against immigration has become key to understanding the growing wave of populism that has hit Western democracies in the last decade
The OLS estimates indicate that irregular immigration is not signif‐ icantly correlated with changes in the share of votes for the Popular Party (PP), while regular immigration is negatively correlated and significant at the 5% level
Spain was considered an exception in the European context, as previous evidence indicated that immigra‐ tion yielded a political premium to the left
Summary
Unwrapping the political discourse against immigration has become key to understanding the growing wave of populism that has hit Western democracies in the last decade. A natural way to estimate how much tax revenue is lost due to irregular migration is to evaluate amnesty programs In this regard, Monras et al (2020) document that payroll tax revenue increased yearly by 4,000 euros per each newly legalized immigrant after the 2005 reg‐ ularization carried out by the socialist party (PSOE) in Spain. Distances to schools and parents have fewer childcare options in areas where the share of immigrants is higher This type of argument applies to both docu‐ mented and undocumented immigrants without distinc‐ tion, and it becomes an issue when the geographic dis‐ tribution of irregular migrants differs from regular ones, as will be shown below. We shed light on the controversy and find that Spaniards did not act much differently than their European counterparts
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