How U.S. Immigration Opportunities Affect Chinese Political Attitudes

• In Event: Policy Attitudes and Preference Formation

Abstract

We will examine how U.S. immigration opportunities affect the political attitudes and behavior of Chinese citizens. Existing literature on immigration has generally focused on the native residents’ attitudes toward immigrants, without fully exploring the impacts of moving to a different country on the immigrants themselves. (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014) Our research project seeks to bridge this gap by investigating how immigration opportunities affect the political and ideological leanings of Chinese immigrants, one of the largest groups of new immigrants to the United States. We will leverage the natural experiment of H-1B work visa applications in the U.S., which admit most applicants through a lottery based on their educational backgrounds. The random assignment of immigration opportunities allows us to identify the causal impacts of immigration on political attitudes. In particular, we anticipate two major outcomes, in terms of 1) revealed preference and preference falsification toward the Chinese government model and 2) truthful preference toward the U.S. government model and liberal democratic values.

Before the H-1B lottery results are announced, we will recruit a large sample of respondents (collect their email addresses) who are in the process of applying for an H-1B visa. All respondents will be asked a set of demographic questions. After the H-1B lottery results are announced, we will send out a second-round survey to a 50% random sample of the respondents we recruited. We will first ask whether they won the lottery, and then present our outcome questions. The China outcome questions will include questions on regime support and questions on political behavior that may be regarded as anti-regime. The U.S. outcome questions will include questions on support for democracy and on political participation. One week after the survey, we will work with NGOs to send out emails about both online and offline political events in the U.S. (China-related or not related). We will measure the difference in click-through rates of these emails among the lottery winners and losers. Finally, three months afterward, we will send out the same survey to the remaining 50% of our recruited respondents to evaluate the long-term effects. We have conducted a pilot and received promising results in both sets of outcomes: Winning the H-1B work visa appears to have reduced preference falsification toward the Chinese government and increased support for democracy, liberal values, and political participation in the U.S.

The project has been awarded the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Initiative Research Grant of $5,000, and we are applying for additional grants. Our research will contribute to the research on the H-1B immigration policy (Kerr and Lincoln 2010; Peri, Shih, and Sparber 2015), preference falsification (Kuran 1995), Chinese citizens’ ideologies and support for democratic values (Pan and Xu 2018), and the political socialization of immigrants (see, e.g., Dancygieand Laitin 2014, Portes and Rumbaut 2014). It is also directly related to the recent work of Fan et al. (2020) showing that racial discrimination increases Chinese overseas students’ support for authoritarian rule in China. Moreover, the results will have important implications for U.S. immigration policies, especially in light of the ongoing U.S.-China competition on both technological and ideological grounds.

Authors

• Yiwei Tang, Harvard University

• Qitong Cao, Stanford Graduate School of Business