Attitudes Toward Immigration: Ethnicity Trumps Skills But Not Legality?

Abstract

Objective The objectives of this study were to parse the effect of ethnicity as a potential driver of public perception of immigrants from previous finding on the labor market competition hypothesis (e.g., Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2015). Methods We rely on survey experiments to analyze the effect of ethnicity on attitude formation toward immigrants. In a first experiment, we test whether favoritism for high‐skilled immigrants diminishes when we add the Hispanic descriptor. In a second experiment, we examine whether public opinion toward undocumented immigrants is affected by region of origin. Results We find that favoritism for high‐skilled immigrants drops when we add the Hispanic descriptor, but that legal status outweighs any possible anti‐Hispanic sentiment. Conclusion Our study provides a novel setup to study the interaction between economic factors and ethnicity as drivers of attitudes toward immigration among California's voters. We find some evidence that supports our hypothesis that anti‐Hispanic sentiment drives attitude formation toward immigrants and immigration.

Perceptions of the socioeconomic effects of Venezuelan migration among informal traders in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)

“…In general, Knowledge of migration (COM), Social effects of migration (ESM) and Economic effects of migration (EEM) explain 15% of the variance in the endogenous variable Perceptions of migration (PHM), corroborating the findings of studies on the effects of social (Malhotra et al 2015;Hopkins 2010;España and Vera 2020;Billiet, Meuleman, and De Witte 2014;Goldstein and Peters 2014;Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014) and economic factors (Mocetti and Porello 2010;Guerreiro, Rebelo, and Teles 2020;Chassamboulli and Peri 2020;Facchini, Frattini, and Mayda 2015) on perceptions of migration at the international level.…”

“…Another factor that should be considered in studies of perceptions is their relationship with the formulation of public policies (Tsai, Tsai, and Huang 2019;España and Vera 2020) and with established policies between nations (Xu 2019;Das, Marjit, and Kar 2020;Furlanetto and Robstad 2019). These policies shape the conditions that increase migration flows, creating favourable conditions in the destination country or adverse conditions in the country of origin.…”