Intergenerational Mobility and the Political Economy of Immigration∗

Flows of US immigrants are concentrated at the extremes of the skill distribution. We develop a dynamic political economy model consistent with these observations. Individuals care about wages and the welfare of their children. Skill types are complementary in production. Voter support for immigration requires that the children of median-voter natives and of immigrants have suffi ciently dissimilar skills. We estimate intergenerational transition matrices for skills, as measured by education, and find support for immigration at high and low skills, but not in the middle. In a version with guest worker programs, voters prefer high-skilled immigrants but low-skilled guest workers.