Analyzing prejudice against immigrants in sending countries: The Brazilian case

Abstract

Prejudice against immigrants has been widely studied in the literature, but analyzing immigrant‐receiving countries is not the same as analyzing sending countries, where the number of immigrants is very low. To address this gap, we examine the case of Brazil, a country that has witnessed numerous anecdotal episodes of prejudice against immigrants despite having a very low flow of migrants and therefore minimal material effects on the local population. Our study focuses on the levels of discrimination against immigrants in Brazil, with a specific analysis of four groups—Haitians, Germans, Venezuelans, and internal migrants known as nordestinos. We consider three policy‐related scenarios—housing, health care, and job training. To mitigate social desirability bias, we employ a combination of list and endorsement survey experiments in a face‐to‐face national sample of 1850 respondents conducted in January 2019. The results reveal a widespread negative perception of all groups of foreigners across all scenarios except the local group of migrants. The findings suggest that the Brazilian public's discrimination against foreigners is linked to a pervasive misperception of the social and economic threat immigrants allegedly pose to the nation.