Impacts of Climate Change on American Immigrant Flows and Employment Sectors

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impacts of natural disasters caused by climate change on American immigrant flows and American immigrants’ employment sectors. This paper consists of two distinct quantitative analyses. The first analysis investigates the relationship between climate disasters and the number of people that immigrated to the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 (which is the closest intact decade before the pandemic) for several countries and shows a positive relationship between climate change and American immigrant flows. This part also discusses the inherent variation between developed countries and developing countries, and analyzes the relationship between the gross domestic production index and the number of people that immigrated to the U.S. In the second part of the analysis, the paper analyzes the several American states that contain the highest number of immigrants and which employment sectors immigrants preferred in 2015, which is the median year of the period in the first analysis. As a result, the result shows that American immigrants’ employment sector distribution varies for each state, and American immigrants are more likely to participate in fundamental occupations such as agriculture and infrastructure construction. At the end of the paper, some viable suggestions on current immigration policy and future prospects in the related research fields are mentioned.