Wednesday, 21 May 2025
16:00 - 17:00 (CEST)
Location:
Meeting Room 1, 3rd floor, PSK, Georg Coch Platz 2, 1010 Vienna and online via Zoom
Please register here.
Asparagus! Worker Shortages and Local Immigration Support
(with Gloria Gennaro and Tiziano Rotesi)
Daniel Auer,
Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, and University of Mannheim
Abstract:
Do peoples' attitudes towards immigration change when exposed to dramatic declines in the availability of immigrant labor? Swiss agricultural production relies heavily on foreign labor. However, the pandemic lockdown caused a shortage of foreign seasonal workers in the spring of 2020. We combine fine-grained voting results from referendums on restricting immigration with variation in seasonal worker needs. We establish that municipalities growing spring crops and, therefore, facing severe shortages of foreign labor in spring 2020, voted significantly more in favor of immigration in September 2020 compared to otherwise similar municipalities. Further, using text data from open-ended survey questions, we document how this shock popularized a narrative highlighting the role of foreign workers as complements to the local native ones rather than substitutes. We conclude that economic shocks can influence economic narratives and, ultimately, change attitudes toward immigration.
About the presenter:
Daniel Auer is Assistant Professor at the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy and fellow at the University of Mannheim’s Center for European Social Research, Germany. In his research, he explores how societal attitudes, norms, and policies evolve and influence inequality among social groups. He further examines how these dynamics affect migration and integration, conflict, and individual preferences, with a focus on the interplay between inequality and social mobility. His studies appear in leading journals in Sociology, Political Science, and Economics.
Currently, Daniel Auer is Paul Lazarsfeld Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna, Department of Demography.
