LAUSR

In recent decades, the global south has witnessed an explosive increase in the number of people relocating from rural to urban areas. Yet many migrants struggle to integrate into destination cities, facing severe hurdles to accessing adequate housing, as well as essential public goods and services such as healthcare and education. We posit that a key explanation for these difficulties lies in unequal political representation. We conduct two audit experiments to test whether urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants vis-à-vis long-term residents (“natives”) in providing essential constituency services. We find that fictitious migrants are 23% less likely to receive a callback from a councilor in response to a mailed letter request for assistance compared to an otherwise similar native. What mechanisms explain this effect? In a second experiment using SMS, we show that migrants signaling that they are registered to vote in municipal ward elections receive callbacks at much higher rates than migrants signaling they are unregistered. Even more strikingly, signaling that migrants are registered to vote closes the migrantnative callback gap documented in the first experiment. We take this to indicate that politicians’ beliefs about migrants’ generally low participation in city elections leads them to ignore requests by migrants for help, because they foresee no electoral returns to providing assistance. Overall, this paper informs policy debates about how to improve the welfare of internal migrants, who count among the world’s most marginalized population groups. In recent decades, cities and towns across the global south have witnessed explosive population growth—a trend spurred, in significant measure, by rural-to-urban migration (Bell and Charles-Edwards, 2013). Fast-paced urbanization generates sizable economic gains. Economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx viewed metropolitan expansion as both the “natural outcome of the development of the productive forces as well as the launch pad for sustaining that development” (Merrifield, 2013, 22), while modern commentators have dubbed cities “our greatest invention” (Glaeser, 2011). Yet—and as Marx famously recognized—such rapid demographic transformations carry the potential to dramatically reconfigure social and political life. Across the urban centers of the developing world, migrants hungry for opportunity and advancement contribute to a burgeoning, marginalized underclass (Davis, 2006). Teeming informal settlements—characterized by high crime levels, as well as inadequate infrastructure, housing, healthcare, and education—are hallmarks of megacities such as Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, and Mumbai (Auerbach, 2016). With the world’s urban population projected to increase by 2.5 billion people by 2050, and with 90 percent of that surge concentrated in Asia and Africa, the task of integrating internal migrants ranks among the most urgent challenges confronting governments across the global South today (United Nations, 2014). What accounts for patterns of government neglect in cities undergoing rapid growth? In particular, do elected officials charged with providing essential goods and services to urban citizens respond differently to migrant newcomers compared to long-term city residents? And if so, on what basis? Despite recent attempts to document the hurdles encountered by international immigrants in Western Europe and the United States (Adida, Laitin and Valfort, 2010; Dancygier, 2010; Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2014), existing scholarship remains blind to the parallel challenges faced by internal migrants in poorer countries. Given that domestic population flows numerically far outstrip international immigration movements, this represents a serious omission—one that we set out to rectify.