Explaining time trends in public opinion: Attitudes towards immigration and immigrants

Abstract

Why does public opinion change over time? Much debate on this question centers on whether it is caused by the replacement of people or by individuals changing how they think. Theoretical approaches to this question have emphasized the importance of birth cohort succession, generational differences, and changing macro-economic conditions. In this article, we consider the extent to which these processes can account for changing attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. We use a new approach to the study of time trends in public opinion to analyze over 20 years of data on attitudes in Canada. This approach uses multi-level analysis to split attitudinal change into its cohort and period components. We find that most attitude change is the result of changing macro-economic conditions. In contrast, birth cohort succession has little effect. While there is modest evidence of generational differences in attitudes, these differences do not comprise a major part of the overall trend.

Do Pathways Matter? Linking Early Immigrant Employment Sequences and Later Economic Outcomes: Evidence from Canada

“…The increase in anti‐immigrant sentiment that has occurred in recent years in much of Europe, Australia, and the United States has largely passed Canada by. Indeed, overt support for immigration has grown over time in Canada, and has remained at relatively high rates since the early 2000s (Wilkes and Corrigall‐Brown ). A Pew Global Attitudes Survey conducted just after the immigrants in this study were admitted to Canada found that 77% of Canadians had a positive view of immigrants, compared with less than half of respondents in the United States and Europe (Pew Global Attitudes Project ).…”

Trust in government: A micro–macro approach

“…Therefore, the existing approaches are not the same as the micro-macro approach used in this paper. Because a number of scholars have highlighted the role of birth cohort succession as a cause of the decline in political trust, a cross-classified model with both year and cohort specified as random intercepts was also specified (see also Schwadel, 2010;Wilkes, 2011;Wilkes & Corrigall-Brown, 2011;Yang & Land, 2006). However, since the variance for cohort was extremely small, this particular level was dropped.…”

Minority nations and attitudes towards immigration: the case of Quebec

“…Attitudes towards immigration might then vary along those lines as well. In the broader Canadian context, Wilkes and Corrigall‐Brown () have shown that immigrants and subsequent generations of immigrants are more positively oriented towards immigration than the rest of the population; the same is likely to also apply to Quebec. Moreover, one might think that given the minority status of French within the Canadian context and the past linguistic transfer towards English among immigrants, Quebecers of French Canadian origin might be more ambivalent towards immigration than fellow Quebecers of English Canadian origin.…”