Immigration Policy Preferences Research Articles

Immigration Policy Preferences in Six EU Countries: The Shadow of Intergovernmental Conflicts in Public Opinion

AbstractMigration politics in the European Union (EU) is highly conflictual. The Dublin framework produces, consolidates and constantly re‐enforces divides amongst the governments of EU member states. A prime example is the country‐of‐first‐entry principle, which sets countries at the external EU border against non‐border countries. We investigate whether evidence of these conflicts amongst governments also translate into cross‐national divides in public opinion. To this end, we separate EU countries along two lines, border versus non‐border and host versus non‐host countries, and derive policy positions for six member states with respect to four immigration policies. The analysis of original survey data shows that public opinion follows, as expected, the patterns of intergovernmental conflicts. That the public is, like the governments, divided along national lines highlights the dominance of intergovernmental conflict in EU migration politics. As long as this logic prevails, the potential for collective action in EU migration policy‐making remains narrow.

How gender shapes attitudes and concerns about immigration

ABSTRACT Gender disparities in political attitudes and behavior are widely documented. However, when it comes to immigration policy, there is a lack of consensus in existing research: some studies indicate that women are more opposed to accommodating immigrants than men, while others suggest the contrary or find no significant gender difference. In an effort to shed light on these conflicting findings, this paper focuses on gendered differences in how individuals perceive and cultivate concerns about immigrants. We argue that gender plays a crucial role in how misconceptions about immigrants activate concerns about immigrants. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a pre-registered survey experiment in the Netherlands, in which we randomly varied participants' perceptions of the characteristics of the immigrant population. Our results offer suggestive evidence consistent with previous findings: altering immigrant perceptions did not significantly impact immigration policy preferences of either gender. However, perceiving immigrants as more in need did affect individuals' concerns about immigrants: we found that revised perceptions led men, but not women, to feel less morally obligated to accommodate immigrants.

Tough Positions, Trustful Voters? How Mainstream Party Position-Taking on Immigration Shapes Political Trust and its Impact on Far-Right Voting

Abstract Mainstream parties have taken increasingly restrictive immigration policy positions across Western Europe. Yet the political consequences of this behaviour for citizens' democratic norms and practices are still not well understood. This article focuses on public political trust. Bridging the literatures on immigration-related trust and spatial theory, the spotlight is put on the consequences of mainstream party position-taking on immigration for the interconnectedness of citizens' immigration policy preferences, political distrust and far-right voting. An analysis of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and European Social Survey across 14 Western European democracies (2006–2018) suggests that tougher immigration positions of centre-right parties in government weaken the link between immigration scepticism and political distrust and, in turn, the relevance of political distrust as a precursor of far-right voting. This has important implications for our understanding of immigration politics and advances the existing literatures on party competition, political trust and far-right voting in several ways.

The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States

Abstract In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans’ immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats’ aggregate immigration opinions liberalized considerably. We observed increasingly liberal immigration preferences among Democrats of all racial and ethnic backgrounds after 2016, but this trend was especially pronounced among white Democrats. Among Republicans, opinion on immigration remained mostly stable over this period, although in some cases it became more conservative (e.g., border security) and more liberal on others (e.g., amnesty). The marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring immigration opinion in the late twentieth century.

Is Cross-Group Friendship Related to Less Perceived Criminal Threat of Immigrants and Less Negative Attitudes Toward Immigrants to the United States?

In recent years, the U.S. public has become increasingly concerned about the immigration issue. Criminological research and group threat theory suggest that harsh immigration policy preferences may be driven by perceived criminal threat of immigrants. More research is needed to understand how to reduce perceived immigrant criminality and negative attitudes toward immigrants. Using intergroup contact theory and an American adult sample ( N = 1,037), the current study tests if cross-group friendship with foreign-born immigrants may reduce negative immigration attitudes both directly, and indirectly by lowering perceived criminal threat of immigrants. Results from regression analyses showed that perceived criminal threat was positively related to negative immigration attitudes. Cross-group friendship was directly related to less perceived criminal threat and less negative immigration attitudes. However, results from mediation analyses showed that cross-group friendship did not further reduce negative immigration attitudes indirectly via lowered perceived criminal threat. The results highlight the importance of meaningful cross-group friendship in mitigating negative immigrant perceptions and call for future research to further investigate ways to correct criminal typification of immigrants.

Numbers, Selectivity, and Rights: The Conditional Nature of Immigration Policy Preferences

Immigration is an extremely divisive political issue in Western Europe and North America. We examine whether immigration policy preferences are more nuanced than commonly understood. Too often, analyses of immigration policy preferences only consider the number of people allowed into the country. Yet, immigration policy must also address which people are allowed into the country and what rights they can have. We present results from a series of original surveys conducted in Germany between April 2020 and August 2022. We find preferences about policies governing immigration flows are conditional on policies governing entrance criteria and rights eligibility. Respondents who oppose immigration in general are willing to compromise and allow more immigration if entrance criteria become more selective. Respondents who support immigration are willing to compromise and accept less immigration if rights become more generous. Our findings have implications for understanding divides over immigration as well as policy debates more generally.

Communicating Economic Evidence About Immigration Changes Attitudes and Policy Preferences

Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants’ impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences—especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual elements that increasingly appear in media. Using a survey experiment fielded in the United Kingdom, we examined whether evidence about European Union immigrants’ modestly positive economic impacts on the United Kingdom—presented either as text, with visualizations, or as an animated film—changed immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Although visual elements did not have an effect over and above text, all the informational treatments moved attitudes and preferences in positive directions, even among Leave voters. Our study brings together research on immigration public opinion and visual media and has implications for policymaking and journalism practice.

Living in the Shadow of Deportation: How Immigration Enforcement Forestalls Political Assimilation

Prior research demonstrates that acculturated co-ethnics of immigrant groups adopt restrictive immigration policy preferences akin to that of host country dominant groups. However, acculturated U.S. Latinxs still maintain relatively open immigration policy preferences despite their distance from the canonical immigrant archetype (e.g., Spanish-speaking, immigrant). To answer the puzzle, I draw on sociological perspectives and theorize that the increased societal integration of undocumented immigrants in tandem with an expanding interior immigration enforcement apparatus generates rebuff against Anglo political norms among acculturated Latinxs. Using 6 national Latinx surveys, I corroborate my theory and find perceptibly threatening immigration enforcement contexts forestall the adoption of restrictive immigration policy preferences via acculturation. Absent deportation threat, acculturated Latinxs adopt immigration preferences similar to white Anglos. I also replicate these findings for attitudinal dimensions outside immigration policy preferences. This paper suggests political assimilation is not preordained among acculturated immigrant co-ethnics in light of an unreceptive host society.

Immigration Threat Amplifiers and Whites’ Immigration Attitudes in the Age of Trump

The US public’s immigration attitudes have become more favourable in recent years, yet the Trump administration (2017-2021) was the most restrictionist on immigration of any modern US presidency. What key sociopolitical factors were associated with holding more exclusionary immigration attitudes and policy preferences among US whites, the ethnoracial group most likely to support Trump, at the beginning of his administration? Analyses of two waves of nationally representative US panel survey data for whites demonstrate that voting for Trump, consuming conservative news, being evangelical, and having a stronger white racial identity were linked with more exclusionary abstract immigration attitudes and/or support for one more Trump-era policies: the US-Mexico wall, the Travel Ban targeting majority-Muslim countries, and deportations of unauthorised immigrants. Together, our results emphasise the value of attending to multiple aspects of the national sociopolitical context, considering diverse potential sources that amplify immigration threat, and jointly examining abstract immigration attitudes and specific policy preferences of varying salience.

Terrorism and Immigration Policy Preferences

ABSTRACT What is the causal impact of terrorism on immigration policy preferences? Under what circumstances and due to which psychological micro-mechanisms does this impact materialize? To answer these questions, we provide evidence from pre-registered and well-powered experiments for Germany and the United Kingdom. We find that anti-immigration responses to terrorism follow an emotional proximity rationale: terrorism leads to more restrictive migration policy preferences only among individuals with high levels of perceived insecurity, especially when terrorism occurs in their own country. Policy preferences are not affected by terrorism abroad or by information cues on the objectively low probability of being victimized.

Who belongs in America? Latinxs' skin tones, perceived discrimination, and opposition to multicultural policies.

Consequences of colorism are well documented, yet little is known about its relationship with political views of racial/ethnic minorities. Although a very small literature found no evidence that skin tone shapes political attitudes of Latinx Americans, the present study was the first to extend this to immigration and language policy preferences. Because support for public policies is an important mechanism through which inequality is either reduced or reproduced, this filled an important gap in the literature on colorism and political behavior. Using binary or ordered logistic regression, skin tone, perceived discrimination, and demographic characteristics were examined as predictors of Latinxs' policy preferences for U.S. border security and/or mandated use of English. Several probability samples were analyzed: one national sample (N = 430), as well as other national (N = 349, mean age 41), regional (N = 256, mean ages 36-40), and nationally representative samples (N = 8,065, mean ages 32-35). Relative to their counterparts, the lightest-skinned Latinx women were more tolerant of restrictive policies-tighter border security and a preference for English as the only official language. Among Latinx men, medium-skinned subgroups reported the most unfavorable opinions about a U.S. border wall policy whereas lighter-skinned men were less opposed to this policy. Findings suggested that skin tone biases may be tied to men's engagement on border security issues and women's support for language and border policies. Therefore, colorism may be implicated in important processes that shape American politics and Latinx public opinion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Thinking Globally about Attitudes to Immigration: Concerns about Social Conflict, Economic Competition and Cultural Threat

AbstractThis article looks globally at the motivations behind attitudes to immigration. Such motivations have been typically conceptualised by academics either in terms of the ‘economic competition’ or ‘cultural threat’ that immigrants are perceived to pose to the individual or their ‘in‐group’. We propose and test a third possibility: that support for or opposition to immigration is determined by one's perceptions of immigration's effects on social conflict. Using the 2017–2020 World Values Survey (WVS) for forty‐nine countries, we show that: in most countries, globally, citizens are more likely to agree than disagree that immigration leads to social conflict; levels of concern about the effects of immigration on social conflict are higher than those regarding unemployment or culture in sixteen—disproportionately economically developed—countries; concern about social conflict is conceptually and distributionally distinct; belief that immigration leads to social conflict predicts immigration policy preferences; but, uniquely, is positively predicted by higher education. Our findings highlight the importance of institutional conflict resolution capacity, including those related to integration, for the politics of migration.

What Do We Reliably Know about European Perceptions of Muslim Asylum Seekers?

Immigration restrictions imposed by national governments are arguably the factor most responsible for the European Refugee Crisis (ERC). As immigration policies do not fall under the remit of European Union sovereignty, the union’s democratic nations are free to operate their own regimes. Although the primary drivers of national immigration policies have been identified as both economic and cultural in nature, empirical evidence suggests that the latter is of greater significance. Given that the perceived fear of value incompatibilities forms the basis of all cultural arguments against immigration, it was necessary to investigate the accuracy of perceptions of Muslim Asylum Seeker Values (MASV) by administering surveys in two countries at the opposite end of the immigration policy spectrum: Hungary and the Netherlands. Hungarians significantly overestimated MASV extremity while Dutch people underestimated them. Moreover, the results indicated that perceptions of MASV extremity correlate with immigration policy preferences.

Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences

Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented—impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

Cui Bono? Partisanship and Attitudes Toward Refugees

ObjectiveThis paper tests the hypothesis that the expected partisan affiliation of refugee populations partially explains why white conservatives and white liberals have different attitudes toward refugee resettlement in the United States.MethodThis was tested with a preregistered survey experiment that examined how attitudes toward refugee resettlement changed depending on the racial and political characteristics of a theoretical refugee population.ResultsConservative opposition to refugee resettlement can be weakened if conservatives are given reasons to believe those refugees will support the Republican Party. At the same time, liberal support for refugees drops when they receive the same information.ConclusionAlthough white conservatives and white liberals exhibit different levels of racial prejudice, and this has consequences for their immigration and refugee policy preferences, their beliefs about how newcomers influence domestic partisan politics are also consequential.

Media effects on policy preferences toward free movement: evidence from five EU member states

ABSTRACT In a time when freedom of movement is being challenged by an increasing number of European Union member states, and where immigration has been dominating public debate for years, this study investigates the effects (i.e. frame salience and frame sentiment) of migration news on individuals’ attitudes about free movement. We are taking into account respondents individual media diet by linking a two-wave online survey in five European countries (n = 7,794) with an automated content analysis of online news coverage in these countries (n = 26,696). Findings indicate that overall the salience of specific frames (i.e. labour market and security), as well as sentiment, positively influence free movement attitudes among citizens. However, there are country-specific differences for both salience and sentiment effects. These findings have implications for our understanding of media effects on immigration attitudes and policy preferences as well as for comparative media effects research in general.

Are Danes’ Immigration Policy Preferences Based on Accurate Stereotypes?

Stereotypes about 32 country-of-origin groups were measured using an online survey of the adult, non-elderly Danish population (n = 476 after quality control). Participants were asked to estimate each group’s net fiscal contribution in Denmark. These estimates were then compared to the actual net fiscal contributions for the 32 groups, taken from a report by the Danish Ministry of Finance. Stereotypes were found to be highly accurate, both at the aggregate level (r = 0.81) and at the individual level (median r = 0.62). Interestingly, participants over- rather than underestimated the net fiscal contributions of groups from countries with a higher percentage of Muslims. Indeed, this was true at both the aggregate and individual levels (r = −0.25 and median r = −0.49, respectively). Participants were also asked to say how many immigrants from each group should be admitted to Denmark. There was a very strong correlation between participants’ aggregate immigration policy preferences and their estimates of the 32 groups’ fiscal contributions (r = 0.98), suggesting that their preferences partly reflect accurate stereotypes. Most of the analyses were pre-registered.

Labour market dualism and immigration policy preferences

ABSTRACTWhat are the effects of labour market deregulation and increased immigration inflows on public attitudes towards immigration? Despite increased levels of dualism and free movement of labour in European countries over the last two decades, the effects of these policy developments are still unclear in the literature. This study argues that high concentrations of migrant workers in non-standard forms of employment decrease economic redistribution towards, and labour competition with, immigrants. Consequently, the politicisation of immigrant-native conflicts is paradoxically lower when immigration and labour market dualism cluster together at the occupational level. These claims are validated cross-nationally, and in a difference-in-differences setting analysing the impact of the 2005 German Immigration Act.

The Role of Information Provision for Attitudes Towards Immigration: An Experimental Investigation

We conduct a survey experiment on the effect of information provision on attitudes towards immigration in Germany. The focus lies on two theory-based economic channels, labor market and welfare state concerns, and immigration policy preferences. Using probability-based representative survey data, we experimentally vary the quantity and the type of information provided to respondents. We find that a bundle of information on both the share and the unemployment rate of foreigners robustly decreases welfare state concerns about immigration. There are slightly less pronounced effects on the labor market and policy channels. Further data-driven analyses reveal heterogeneity in treatment effects. Our findings therefore suggest that careful composition and targeting of information interventions can increase their effectiveness in the public debate on immigration.

Are Latinos Becoming White? The Role of White Self-Categorization and White Identity in Shaping Contemporary Hispanic Political and Policy Preferences

Census data show that a majority of Hispanics self-categorize as white and a substantial proportion express attachment to white identity. Sociologists suggest that such selections are an artifact of the Census, not psychologically nor politically consequential. This study draws on history, sociology and recent advances in the study of white identity among Anglos, to develop an argument for why Hispanics show attachment to whiteness and what may be the implications of such identity choices for Hispanics’ political and policy preferences. First, we specify descriptive demographic analyses to predict white self-categorization and white identity among Hispanics. Second, using the 2012 ANES data, we show that attachment to white identity is an important predictor of partisanship, ideology and welfare policy preferences, while there is some evidence that white self-categorization, but not white identity, positively correlates with restrictive immigration policy preferences.