Immigration Flows and International Trade

This work tests the overall effect of the total acceptance number of temporary immigration form i-94 on total volume of trade dynamics between United States of America and 141 trade partner countries for the period of last 21 years for which statistical data is available up to 2018. The primary motivation of this empirical work is the general intuition on behavior of people in case of changing diplomatic relations and general situation in economy as well as comparatively minor research effort in that direction. The main finding is that temporary immigration is negatively related to the total volume of trade. Resulted effect sign is significant econometrically and in line with general intuition. Overall, number of filings for temporary presence in US serves as indicator of some underlying processes that affect both number of i-94 applications and trade between partner countries and US but in different direction. Paper does not pursue the goal of revealing such underlying factors, but the found effect receives possible explanation variants and paves the way for formulating supplemental hypotheses and testing them in further research and event studies.