Public opinion research on immigration attitudes has largely overlooked the question of how survey respondents understand the term ‘immigrants’. This article investigates latent perceptions of immigrants, termed ‘imagined immigration’, among members of the British public. Using novel survey data, I examine who members of the British public have in mind when they think of immigrants. I find that public perceptions of immigration diverge significantly from the set of people identified as immigrants in government statistics and targeted in policy changes. In particular, public perceptions focus on asylum seekers and permanent arrivals, while mostly ignoring international students, a target of new restrictive immigration policies. I also show that variation in individuals' imagined immigration is strongly associated with individual preferences for reduced immigration, suggesting imagined immigration as a new determinant of anti‐immigration policy preferences to consider in future research.

Existing research on public opinion related to race and immigration politics emphasizes the role of prejudice or bias against minority groups. We argue that the social norm against prejudice, and individual motivations to comply with it, are crucial elements omitted from prior analyses. In contemporary Western societies, most citizens receive strong signals that prejudice is not normatively acceptable. We demonstrate that many majority-group individuals have internalized a motivation to control prejudiced thoughts and actions and that this motivation influences their political behavior in predictable ways. We introduce measures capturing this motivation, develop hypotheses about its influence, and test these hypotheses in three separate experimental and nonexperimental survey studies conducted in Britain and Germany. Our findings support a dual-process model of political behavior suggesting that while many voters harbor negative stereotypes, they also-particularly when certain contextual signals are present-strive to act in accordance with the "better angels of their natures."

Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on “illegal” immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to analyze 43 million words of news from 2010 to 2012. Among other findings, we show that press portrayals match public perceptions of migrants, with “illegal immigrants” and “failed asylum seekers” as predominant depictions in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers.

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This study examines public support for a key contested multicultural policy in contemporary Europe: the provision of religious schools. It makes two main contributions, one substantive and one theoretical. Substantively, the main contribution is to provide new experimental evidence demonstrating the existence of discrimination against Muslims on a central issue of multicultural social policy. Theoretically, the main contribution is to propose an explanation for variations in patterns of discrimination that highlights the role of individuals' motivation to control prejudice. Through moderation analysis, we show that individuals who express stronger motivation to control prejudice are more likely to treat Muslim and Christian requests for religious schools equally, and they are more likely to retain their support for Muslim schools in the wake of a threatening Islamist terrorist incident. Because we conducted the experiments in three countries, we in addition find societal-level patterns of variation: Individuals' motivation to control

Research shows that ethnic minority candidates often face an electoral penalty at the ballot box. In this study, we argue that this penalty depends on both candidate and voter characteristics, and that pro-minority policy positions incur a greater penalty than a candidate's ethnic background itself. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a panel study of British voters, we investigate the relative contributions of candidate ethnicity, policy positions, affirmative action, and voter attitudes to this electoral penalty. We find that although Pakistani (Muslim) candidates are penalized directly for their ethnicity, black Caribbean candidates receive on average the same levels of support as white British ones. However, black Caribbean candidates suffer conditional discrimination where they are penalized if they express support for prominority policies, and all candidates are penalized for having been selected through an affirmative action initiative. We also find that some white British voters are more inclined to support a black Caribbean candidate than a white British one, all else being equal. These voters (one quarter of our sample) have cosmopolitan views on immigration, and a strong commitment to anti-prejudice norms. However, despite efforts across parties to increase the ethnic diversity of candidates for office, many voters' preferences continue to pose barriers toward descriptive and substantive representation of ethnic minority groups.

Why do some Europeans support immigration from within the European Union, while rejecting immigration from elsewhere? Acceptance of intra-European Union mobility—even by those who wish to restrict immigration more generally—is important for popular support for the European Union itself. This paper identifies and attempts to explain the preferences of “EU-only inclusionists”: EU nationals who support relatively high levels of immigration, but only from within the European Union. We analyze an underexplored experimental module in the European Social Survey to explore European Union inclusionism in relation to other preference profiles. We find that identification with the European Union helps explain specific support for European Union mobility, while subnational (racial and religious) identities are associated with a preference for European migrants over non-Europeans, but not with specific support for intra-European Union movement.