The grandfather of an LU blogger was a socialist immigrant who clung to his socialism until the day he died. But only one of his three children was a socialist. In Europe, by contrast, the children of immigrants tend to be left-leaning, too. After controlling for a large set of individual and country characteristics, a 2022 study found that second-generation immigrants to Europe show significantly higher voting preferences for left-leaning policies.
We analyze whether second-generation immigrants have different political preferences relative to observationally identical children of citizens in the host countries. Using data on individual voting behavior in 22 European countries between 2001 and 2017, we characterize each vote on a left-right scale based on the ideological and policy positions of the party receiving the vote. In the first part of the paper, we characterize the size of the “left-wing bias” in the vote of second-generation immigrants after controlling for a large set of individual characteristics and origin and destination country fixed effects. We find a significant left-wing bias of second-generation immigrants, comparable in magnitude to the left-wing bias associated with living in urban (rather than rural) areas. We then show that this left-wing bias is associated with stronger preferences for inequality-reducing government intervention, internationalism and multiculturalism. We do not find that second-generation immigrants are biased towards or away from populist political agendas.
That is from a new paper by Simone Moriconi, Giovanni Peri, and Riccardo Turati.
In places like Scandinavia, that were historically low-crime cultures, immigrants also tend to increase the crime rate. While the pro-immigration former government of Sweden claimed immigration was not leading to a crime wave in Sweden, it admitted that
According to the most recent study, people born abroad are 2.5 times as likely to be registered as a crime suspect as people born in Sweden to two native-born parents. In relation to this latter group, therefore, the relative risk of being suspected of crime for people born abroad is 2.5. For those born in Sweden to two non-native parents, the relative risk is 3.2, which means people in this group are slightly more than three times as likely to be registered as a suspected offender as those born in Sweden to two native-born parents.
In the United States, immigration may not, on balance, increase the rate of serious crimes, because the United States has a higher murder rate to begin with than most European countries. It depends on the area, though — a bunch of Latin American immigrants moving into a dangerous city like Detroit, St. Louis, or New Orleans will lower its crime rate, but if the same immigrants move into a city in New Hampshire or Maine, they will likely increase its crime rate.
Whether an area in the U.S. will have a higher or lower crime rate due to immigration depends heavily on its existing demographics. As retired economics professor Mark Perry points out, “Blacks are the only group whose share of arrests for violent crimes is greater (by a factor of almost 3X) than their share of the US population. Whites, Hispanics, and Asians all have lower shares of violent crime arrests vs. their shares of the population.” So if Latin American immigrants move into a heavily-black area (like parts of the South), they may reduce the crime rate. By contrast, if they move into a heavily-white area of the upper midwest or New England, or a heavily Asian area of California, they may increase the crime rate.
Asian immigrants often reduce crime rates by moving into an area in the U.S., because Asians have a lower crime rate than any other race nationally, and usually have a lower crime rate than local whites in the same area as well. Asian immigrants are not an undifferentiated mass: Japanese and Chinese Americans tend to have very low crime rates, whereas some other Asian subgroups have crime rates similar to whites.
