The Influence of Attitudes toward Immigrants on International Migration

Abstract

We investigate whether anti-immigrant attitudes affect migrant inflows in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Using longitudinal exhaustive data, we find that natives' hostility, particularly natives' propensity to discriminate on the labor market, reduces immigration. This effect is comparable to more conventional migration factors. We obtain robust results when we, for example, capture hostility with far-right parties' popularity instead and control for tighter immigration policies or multilateral resistance to migration. We find a stronger effect for EU-to-EU migrants, migrants from developed countries and linguistically close countries. Our results 1 We are indebted to the current editor and the previous editor of the International Migration Review and the anonymous referees for particularly insightful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank David Card, Elke Jahn, Vibeke Jakobsen, Lena Nekby, Giovanni Peri, and Lars Skipper for other valuable and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at seminars at

Pane e Cioccolata: The Impact of Native Attitudes on Return Migration

“…For the case of Mozambique, they identify a significant reduction in emigration intentions after a series of xenophobic attacks targeting immigrants in the regions of destination, in South Africa. Our findings also complement the results of Gorinas and Pytlikova () who analyze the link between native attitudes and migration flows in a cross‐country setting. They conclude that natives’ hostility, measured by the extent of potential labor market discrimination, reduces migration inflows.…”

Public beliefs in social mobility and high-skilled migration

“…Our model is based on the human capital model of Sjastaad (1962) applied by, e.g., Grogger and Hanson (2011), Ortega and Peri (2013), and Gorinas and Pytliková (2017). We focus explicitly on high-skilled migration and extend the theoretical framework -following Lumpe et al (2016) -by a social status motif of high-skilled migrants.…”

“…1 In adding social status to the utility function we go beyond the studies of Grogger andHanson (2011), Ortega andPeri (2013), and Gorinas and Pytliková (2017) which focus solely on income and costs. For reasons of simplicity and as we consider public beliefs in social mobility, we assume a linear utility function and deviate at this point from Lumpe et al (2016) …”

“…Relatively well studied are public attitudes towards immigrants, their variation over different destination countries, and the determinants why natives favor immigration more or less (see, e.g., Bauer, 2000;Mayda, 2006;O'Rourke and Sinnott, 2006;Card et al, 2012). Furthermore, there exists only one empirical study from Gorinas and Pytliková (2017) that links these country-specific public attitudes towards immigrants to inflows of migrants into OECD countries. They find that natives' hostility, particularly natives' propensity to discriminate on the labor market, reduces the number of immigrants.…”

“…They find that natives' hostility, particularly natives' propensity to discriminate on the labor market, reduces the number of immigrants. Gorinas and Pytliková (2017) still use the widespread definition of public attitudes towards immigrants, but do not distinguish between different skill levels of immigrants.…”