Research

Each year, the United States resettles thousands of refugees from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds. We know little on how United States citizens react to the diverse population of refugees. Using refugee placement data by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration, I study how the resettlement of refugees impacts U.S. natives’ voting behavior at the county level in Presidential, Senate, and House elections between 1990 and 2016. The results show that, the placement of refugees is associated with an increase in votes for the Republican Party. To address concerns regarding the endogenous nature of refugee placement, I employ the shift-share instrumental variable approach using the initial share of refugee in a county in 1990 and its interaction with the flow of refugees throughout the research period. The instrumented results support the initial findings. The political effect is heterogeneous between refugees’ country of origin and depends on the relationship between the U.S. and sending country.

Following the Geneva Conference in 1954, Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel, splitting the country into North and South Vietnam, and allowed for 300 days of open borders during which citizens from either side could freely move between regions. Fearing religious persecution and political repression under the communist leadership of North Vietnam, over 800,000 Northern Vietnamese citizens chose to migrate south. This massive migration posed an enormous challenge for South Vietnam, a newly established state with limited resources, even with the support of the French and U.S. military. Despite both Northern refugees and native South Vietnamese being anti-communist, the South Vietnamese saw their Northern co-patriots as financial burdens and completely dependent on domestic and foreign aid. Adding to this, the refugees were perceived as poor, unclean, and culturally different. Many scholars have theorized that this divide, coupled with resource scarcity, created an atmosphere of mistrust and resentment, undermined South Vietnam’s stability and its efforts to resist the growing insurgency of the Viet Cong. I test this hypothesis by first digitizing novel refugee settlement data from the Michigan State University Vietnam Group Archive. This archive contains information on 180 refugee hamlets established in 1955, of which 101 were geo-located. These hamlets were then linked with data from the quarterly Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) from the U.S. National Archives. The HES provides data on the political and economic structures of South Vietnam hamlets, as well as the frequency and intensity of Viet Cong activities. Preliminary linear regression shows that there is a positive and significant result between refugee numbers and a South Vietnam hamlet's Viet Cong activities.