Abstract
An extensive literature exists hypothesizing a negative association between immigration and a multitude of social goods issues. Recent analyses, however, have established that the perception of the size of the immigrant population may be more relevant than the actual size of the population in shaping attitudes, and that the effect of immigration on social policy attitudes may be more salient at the local—or even neighborhood—level than at the country-level. In extending this work, we examine how perceptions and misperceptions about the size of the immigrant population affect attitudes about redistribution and social policies within one of the most diverse and ethnically heterogeneous immigrant cities in the world, New York City. We analyzed data from a diverse sample of 320 NYC residents recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk who responded to a series of questions regarding their perceptions of the size of the immigrant population of their neighborhood before indicating their redistributive and social policy preferences. We found that about a quarter of New Yorkers overestimated the size of the non-citizen population, though the proportion was lower than those in studies of other geographic units. In addition, those that perceived a lower citizen proportion or overestimated the size of the non-citizen population were the least supportive of redistribution and social policies. Implications for the existing research on the relationship between immigration and social policy preferences are discussed.
Highlights
The transnational movement of people has recently become a highly salient and contested issue in social and political life
We analyze the relationship between perceptions about the size of the neighborhood immigrant population and preferences for redistribution and social policy
We examine the relationship between the effects of the accuracy of perceptions of the size of the immigrant population and policy preferences
Summary
The transnational movement of people has recently become a highly salient and contested issue in social and political life. We ask respondents about their perceptions regarding the size of both the immigrant (non-citizens) and citizen populations in research participants’ respective neighborhoods, and examine the accuracy of these perceptions by comparing their responses to data from the American Community Survey (United States Census Bureau, 2017). Gorodzeisky and Semyonov (2019), for example, find that the more respondents misperceive the size of the immigrant population, the greater their antiimmigrant sentiments In extending these ideas to attitudes about government redistribution, Alesina et al (2018) present the results of a large-scale study across six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the U.K., and the United States). Using the same prompt and answer categories described for the perception of citizens question, we asked respondents to estimate the proportion of white people in their neighborhoods We include this measure to control for any possible conflation of whiteness and citizenship. We use a standard measure of race/ethnicity, asking “What is your race/ethnicity? (Please choose all that apply).” The
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