Public Attitudes toward Immigration

Abstract

Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about national-level impacts, whether those impacts are cultural or economic. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it fits the evidence from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when, and why they matter for attitude formation.

Labor Market Competition with Immigrants and Political Polarization

“…Thus, we find clear signs of a polarizing effect of immigration. These findings contradict Hainmueller and Hopkins' (2014) conclusion that labor market competition is irrelevant for voter behavior.…”

“…Failure to do so might explain e.g., the mixed empirical results on the relationship between unemployment and support for far-right parties (Arzheimer and Carter, 2006;Golder, 2003). Importantly, our results show that the political consequences of immigration are not only due to cultural concerns or concerns about the fiscal burden of immigration, and they question the status of labor market competition theory as a "zombie theory" (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014) in immigration research. In our view, too much of the literature on the political consequences of immigration have been concerned about the relative importance of ideology and self-interest (Sides and Citrin 2007).…”

“…If labor market competition matters we, accordingly, expect that immigration from the new EU countries have a stronger impact on voting than the immigration from non-western countries. In contrast, if immigration drives FrP voting due to noneconomic, cultural concerns (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014) we should see larger impact of nonwestern immigration. This is so since we should expect the culturally based reaction to be stronger against individuals from geographically and culturally distant countries.…”

Can Narratives of White Identity Reduce Opposition to Immigration and Support for Hard Brexit? A Survey Experiment

“…al. 2004;Mudde 2007;Hainmueller andHopkins 2014, 2015; Norris and Inglehart 2016). By subtly altering the boundaries of 'us' to include immigrants who wish to assimilate, this strategy ministers to authoritarian concerns (Stenner 2005: 328).…”

The Impact of the Great Recession on Perceived Immigrant Threat: A Cross-National Study of 22 Countries

“…Coupled with high levels of immigration, this made the actual or anticipated life chances of native workers more precarious, causing them to project their fears and anxieties onto immigrants and triggering support for anti-immigrant policies [4] and disapproval of economic redistribution and expansion of the welfare state [5][6][7][8][9]. 1 A vast body of cross-national research has examined the connection between economic decline and anti-immigrant sentiment [1,10]. A major perspective motivating this research is competitive threat theory, which argues that deteriorating economic conditions intensify economic competition with immigrants for scarce resources such as jobs, wages, and welfare benefits, thus contributing…”