Elliott Ash

Title: Immigration and Social Distance: Evidence from Newspapers during the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract: A constant of human history is the migration of peoples in search of a better future. In destination countries, these new arrivals come into contact with both the host population as well as already established immigrant communities. How does the arrival of new immigrants affect the perception of outgroup distance among the native majority group? And do new arrivals also change the perceived distance between the host population and existing immigrant groups? We address these questions in the context of the Age of Mass Migration (1860-1920), a period during which sizeable and diverse groups of migrants arrived on U.S. shores. Applying advanced computational linguistics techniques to a newly processed corpus of over 1.8 million newspaper issues (9 million pages) published by 3,675 local outlets in that period, we present a novel text-based measure of perceived socio-cultural distance between U.S.-born natives and 32 immigrant groups. For each mention of an immigrant group, we compute a  distance measure that captures whether the group's framing more closely resembles contexts used when portraying immigrants, rather than natives. We use this time- and county-varying outcome  to analyse the short- and medium-term effects of immigration inflows on local perceptions of socio-cultural distance toward the arriving and existing immigrant groups.

Bio: Elliott Ash is building a robot judge. As a professor at ETH Zurich's Center for Law & Economics, Elliott investigates the workings of law and policy through the lens of data science. Using natural language processing to sift through legal texts, and with natural experiments to get at causation, this research produces evidence to better understand how legal decisions are made. In the future, this work will provide a framework to support fairer decisions in law and policy. Prior to joining ETH, Elliott held academic positions at University of Warwick and Princeton University, and before that earned a Ph.D. in economics and a J.D. from Columbia University. Elliott's research is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the outputs have been published in leading journals in economics, political science, law,  and computational social science.