Are Immigrants in Favour of Immigration? Evidence from England and Wales

Abstract

Abstract:Using the UK Citizenship Survey for the years 2007-2010, this paper investigates how immigrants view immigration and how these views compare to the views of natives. Immigrants who have been in the UK longer are similar to natives in being opposed to further immigration, while recent immigrants are more in favour of further immigration. Labour market concerns do not play a large role for either immigrants or natives. However, there is some evidence that financial and economic shocks can increase anti-immigration sentiments.

Do Sociotropic Concerns Mask Prejudice? Experimental Evidence on the Sources of Public Opposition to Immigration

“…Within this range, Turkish and other non-Western immigrants are the closest to the native preferences, while the more Westernoriented immigrant groups are placed in the center. Overall, the observational measures bolster previous work on the native-immigrant differences in preferred levels of immigration (Braakmann et al, 2017;Just and Anderson, 2014)-immigrants are indeed more supportive toward higher levels of immigration than their native counterparts, although this difference is not very large. Table A2 in the Supplementary Information presents the nativity gap across the 7-point scale of admission scores.…”

“…These former immigrants, however, have an equal vote in designing the immigration policy of tomorrow. 6 Prior work that focused on immigrants’ attitudes was either focused on other political issues, such as redistribution and social spending (Dancygier and Saunders, 2006), or unable to elucidate causal mechanisms of opposition to immigration due to use of observational research designs (Braakmann et al, 2017; Just and Anderson, 2014). This study addressed this limitation by utilizing an experimental design, ultimately allowing for the identification of determinants of opposition to immigration within these growing segments of Western society.…”

Shielding free movement? Reciprocity in welfare institutions and opposition to EU labour immigration

“…Third, we confirm the linearity of the interaction between reciprocity and unemployment (Hainmueller et al, 2019). Fourth, we test the impact of a set of additional country-level control variables to ascertain the role of institutional reciprocity in our findings, including overall welfare generosity (e.g., Hanson et al, 2007), the immigrant share of the population (e.g., Braakmann et al, 2017), and employment protection legislation (e.g., Ruhs, 2017). We add these controls both at the country-level and interact them with individual unemployment.…”

Party System Polarization, Citizenship, and Immigrant Party Allegiances in Western Europe

“…However, it is also possible that party polarization on immigration control divides and polarizes immigrants, pushing them in different directions as they align with parties in their host country. Existing research shows that while foreign-born residents are on average more pro-immigration than their native-born counterparts, there is considerable heterogeneity in immigrant attitudes toward immigration (Branton 2007;Jiménez 2007;Rouse, Wilkinson, and Garand 2010;Knoll 2012;Just and Anderson 2015;Braakmann, Waqas, and Wildman 2017). If this heterogeneity is large and newcomers choose parties closer to their views, the impact of party polarization on identification with pro-immigration parties may be weak or even insignificant.…”