Abstract/Summary

In this study, we investigate the impact of immigration in the context of a developing country, Turkey. We start with an investigation of the impact of immigration on the employment outcome of natives. We use Borjas’ skill-cell approach to consider skill-specific labour supply shocks to identify the impact of immigration. To correct for potential endogeneity arising from the non-random location choice of immigrants, we also apply an IV analysis in which the instrument is a la Card historical pattern of immigrants from a given country of birth. Findings show that employment within Turkey is not sensitive to immigrant supply shocks at the local level though at the national level, we find that when the share of immigrants increases, the employment rate of natives decreases, seemingly confirming the labour market competition hypothesis. Since the difference in the local and national findings might relate to the internal migration of natives, we turn to this next in our empirical analysis. Once again, we use the skill-cell approach, i.e. whether natives with a particular skill respond to immigrants with similar skill by leaving their local labour market. We expect that if natives relocate themselves when they face immigrant inflows, this may cause a very small and insignificant impact of immigrants at localities. Our findings of OLS analysis support this suspicion that native population factors in the share of immigrants in a given locality in their relocation decision. Although we include a large set of factors that may affect this movement, natives’ location choice is still affected by the existence of immigrant population in localities, and this is not significantly due to employment concerns in terms of in-migration. The insignificance of employment in the relocation decision prompts us to consider subjective attitudes towards immigrants that may push natives away from localities with high share of immigrants. Eventually, in our final empirical chapter, we investigate the attitudes of natives towards immigrants. We consider a range of attitudes including attitudes towards same race, different race, poor immigrants, and immigrants’ role in place, culture and economy. We employ an ordered probit model to explain our categorical dependent variables that measure natives’ attitudes towards immigrants. We find that when the share of immigrants increased in a given region, the probability of reporting negative attitudes increases. Inclusion of several explanatory variables (i.e., individual opinions, beside socio-economic variables) in our ordinary response models do not change the results.In this study, we investigate the impact of immigration in the context of a developing country, Turkey. We start with an investigation of the impact of immigration on the employment outcome of natives. We use Borjas’ skill-cell approach to consider skill-specific labour supply shocks to identify the impact of immigration. To correct for potential endogeneity arising from the non-random location choice of immigrants, we also apply an IV analysis in which the instrument is a la Card historical pattern of immigrants from a given country of birth. Findings show that employment within Turkey is not sensitive to immigrant supply shocks at the local level though at the national level, we find that when the share of immigrants increases, the employment rate of natives decreases, seemingly confirming the labour market competition hypothesis. Since the difference in the local and national findings might relate to the internal migration of natives, we turn to this next in our empirical analysis. Once again, we use the skill-cell approach, i.e. whether natives with a particular skill respond to immigrants with similar skill by leaving their local labour market. We expect that if natives relocate themselves when they face immigrant inflows, this may cause a very small and insignificant impact of immigrants at localities. Our findings of OLS analysis support this suspicion that native population factors in the share of immigrants in a given locality in their relocation decision. Although we include a large set of factors that may affect this movement, natives’ location choice is still affected by the existence of immigrant population in localities, and this is not significantly due to employment concerns in terms of in-migration. The insignificance of employment in the relocation decision prompts us to consider subjective attitudes towards immigrants that may push natives away from localities with high share of immigrants. Eventually, in our final empirical chapter, we investigate the attitudes of natives towards immigrants. We consider a range of attitudes including attitudes towards same race, different race, poor immigrants, and immigrants’ role in place, culture and economy. We employ an ordered probit model to explain our categorical dependent variables that measure natives’ attitudes towards immigrants. We find that when the share of immigrants increased in a given region, the probability of reporting negative attitudes increases. Inclusion of several explanatory variables (i.e., individual opinions, beside socio-economic variables) in our ordinary response models do not change the results.