Migration and the Decline of Social Capital in the U.S.: How Migration Lead to a Reduction in Volunteering between 2004-2010

I am currently finalizing a paper with a Xiaoye Li (PhD student at NUS) entitled: Migration and the Decline of Social Capital in the U.S.: How Migration Lead to a Reduction in Volunteering between 2004-2010. In this paper we use the Volunteer Supplement of the September Sample of the Current Population Survey (CPS) between 2004 and 2010, to look at how migration affects not only social capital (measured by membership in groups) but also investment in social capital (measured by volunteering and hours volunteered). After controlling for spatial sorting of migrants into different locations (by using Card's instrument) we find that areas that see an increase of 1% in immigrants see a decline in the number of volunteers by 5% to 10%. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to establish a link between migration and the decline of social capital described by Putnam (1996)