Sectoral Economies, Economic Contexts, and Attitudes toward Immigration

Abstract

Do economic considerations shape attitudes toward immigration? In this article, we consider the relationship between economic interests and immigration preferences by examining how developments in individuals' sectors of employment affect these views. Using survey data across European countries from 2002 to 2009 and employing new measures of industry-level exposure to immigration, we find that sectoral economies shape opinions about immigration. Individuals employed in growing sectors are more likely to support immigration than are those employed in shrinking sectors. Moreover, the economic context matters: Making use of the exogenous shock to national economies represented by the 2008 financial crisis, we show that sector-level inflows of immigrant workers have little effect on preferences when economies are expanding, but that they dampen support for immigration when economic conditions deteriorate and confidence in the economy declines. These sectoral effects remain even when controlling for natives' views about the impact of immigration on the national economy and culture. When evaluating immigration policy, individuals thus appear to take into account whether their sector of employment benefits economically from immigration.

Nativism or Economic Threat: Attitudes Toward Immigrants During the Great Recession

“…• Following Dancygier and Donnelly (2013), economic hard times should make industry cleavages more prevalent.…”

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

“…Many studies have investigated the relationship between economic decline and anti-immigrant sentiment, but their empirical findings are mixed. Some studies provide evidence that economic decline increases anti-immigrant sentiment [12,13], whereas others find no significant relationship [14][15][16][17][18][19]. A few studies have focused more specifically on the connection between the Great Recession and anti-immigrant attitudes, but their findings have also been mixed [4,20].…”

“…Immigrants can be regarded as potential competitors who threaten dominant group members' opportunities in the labor market. When the economy grows, inflows of immigrants from abroad are not considered to intensify competition [12]. However, the loss of jobs in a depressed economy intensifies intergroup competition over scarce resources in the labor market.…”

“…The research has tested competitive threat theory using either unemployment rates or changes in GDP, but their results have not provided a clear-cut picture of country-level economic factors that affect public attitudes toward immigrants. Some research shows that countries with higher unemployment rates or lower GDPs have more pronounced anti-immigrant sentiments [4,12,13], but other studies regarding the effects of the economic conditions on anti-immigrant attitudes are inconclusive [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Some of these studies find that one or both of the measures of economic conditions have no relationship with attitudes toward immigrants, despite being consistently in the expected direction.…”

Labor Market Competition with Immigrants and Political Polarization

“…One popular approach is to deduce the competition effect from the spatial correlation between the proportion of immigrants and vote shares (e.g., Halla et al, Forthcoming;Harmon, 2014;Sørensen, 2015). Other studies observe labor market penetration of immigrants along occupational and/or sectorial divisions within the same country (Burgoon et al, 2012;Dancygier and Donnelly, 2013). These approaches suffer from similar selection problems.…”