Abstract
Does family history matter for policymaking in democracies? Linking members of Congress to the census, we observe countries of birth for members, their parents, and their grandparents, allowing us to measure ancestry for the politicians in office when U.S. immigration policy changed dramatically, from closing the border in the 1920s to reshaping admittance criteria in the 1960s. We find that legislators descended from immigrant parents or grandparents support more permissive immigration legislation. They are also less likely to speak negatively about immigration in speeches before Congress. A regression discontinuity design analyzing close elections, which addresses district-level selection and holds district composition constant, confirms our results on roll call voting and speech. Efforts to account for selection into immigration—such as comparing international immigrants to domestic migrants and exploiting variation in restrictive legislation targeting specific regions of origin—further confirm the relationship between family immigration experience and more permissive stances on immigration policy. We then explore mechanisms, finding support for in-group identity in connecting family history with policymaking. MCs name their children in ways that express immigrant identity, and immigrant-descended MCs discuss immigration using more personal frames, emphasizing family over economic considerations. Our findings illustrate the important role of personal background in legislative behavior in democratic societies, even on major and controversial topics like immigration, and suggest how experiences transmitted from previous generations can inform lawmakers’ views.
Footnotes
Title quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, April 21, 1938. We thank Ran Abramitzky, Chris Avery, Matthew Baum, Sam Bazzi, Richard Bensel, Leah Boustan, Daniel Carpenter, Devin Caughey, Dara Cohen, Katherine Einstein, Ray Fisman, Martin Fiszbein, Bernard Fraga, Claudia Goldin, Tarek Hassan, Robert Margo, Benjamin Marx, Daniel Moskowitz, Noah Nathan, Bruce Oppenheimer, Daniele Paserman, Spencer Piston, Luisa Godinez Puig, Tobias Resch, Eric Schickler, Deborah Schildkraut, Hanna Schwank, Maya Sen, Marco Tabellini, Randy Walsh, Christopher Warshaw, and Ariel White, as well as participants at SPSA, the Congress and History Conference, the First Annual Historical Political Economy Conference, MPSA, APSA, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Harvard Kennedy School for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Grant Goehring and Danielle Graves for outstanding research assistance.
Accepted manuscripts
