International students and political preferences

This thesis explores the political impact of international students in the United States in presidential and Senate elections using county-level data from 2000 to 2020. To capture the causality, this thesis uses the Instrumental Variable (IV) approach and exploits the past distribution of international students across U.S. counties by countries of origin as a driver of future migration flows. The primary contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate that an increase in international students decreases the vote share of the Republican Party. Potential underlying mechanisms for this negative relationship are analyzed by referring to the political discourses about international students. The findings also suggest that the political impact of international students is heterogeneous across counties depending on the predominance of Republican voters, and is not contingent upon the academic level.