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The Political Science Department would like to congratulate our own Professor Adrian Shin. Shin's dissertation received the 2017 APSA Best Dissertation Award in the Migration and Citizenship Section. His dissertation was viewed by a committee member as “an ambitious, big picture project. His central argument - that ‘natural resource wealth has differential effects on immigration policy under different political institutions’ - is thought-provoking and unambiguously original.” Assistant Professor Shin will receive his award at APSA in San Francisco this September.

Abstract: “Primary Resources, Secondary Labor: Natural Resources and Immigration Policy around the World" seeks to understand why some policymakers open their borders to low-skilled immigrants while others restrict immigration, by looking at the effects of natural resource wealth on pro-immigration firms and policymakers. The three empirical chapters in the dissertation examine the mechanisms through which revenues from capital-intensive natural resources shape immigration policy toward low-skilled workers from the developing world. The empirical findings in the dissertation demonstrate that natural resource wealth has differential effects on immigration policy under different political institutions; policymakers of resource-rich democracies tend to restrict low-skill immigration while resource-rich autocracies rely on foreign labor.