KAIST study links immigration politics to rise in toxic emissions

The politicization of immigration issues can weaken environmental enforcement by redirecting the government's limited regulatory capacity, ultimately affecting corporate environmental performance, according to new research.

KAIST announced Sunday that a joint research team led by Lee Na-rae, a professor in the School of Management Engineering at KAIST, and Heli Wang, a professor at Singapore Management University, analyzed immigration-related legislation and environmental data across the United States. The team found that as immigration becomes a more politically salient issue, government environmental oversight weakens and corporate toxic emissions increase.

The research team defined this phenomenon as "institutional crowding."

Government administrative capacity and budgets are finite. When a new political issue emerges, government attention and resources concentrate on that area, and enforcement in relatively lower-profile policy areas such as environmental oversight can weaken as a result. The team used immigration as its case study but said the mechanism is not unique to that issue — it can arise whenever political agendas compete for a government's limited resources.

The research team combined data from the US Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory with state-level immigration legislation data. Analyzing 82,377 records from 14,390 manufacturing facilities across the United States between 2010 and 2018, the team found that each additional immigration-related bill was associated with an average increase of about 1 percent in toxic emissions per facility — equivalent to roughly 25 kilograms of additional toxic releases per factory.

The team said the increase was not the result of relaxed environmental standards. Rather, companies reduced costly pollution-abatement and toxic-waste-disposal efforts as government environmental oversight became relatively lax.

The effect was particularly pronounced in states with strained finances. In states carrying heavy debt or fiscal burdens, environmental oversight weakened further as political attention shifted to new issues.

"The findings of this research can be extended beyond environmental policy to other areas such as public health, workplace safety and education," Lee said. "Governments must establish institutional buffers — such as dedicated budget allocations and independent enforcement agencies — to maintain stable regulatory enforcement even as political agendas shift rapidly."

The findings were published in the Journal of Management, an international academic journal in the field of business administration.