An analysis of public opinion toward undocumented immigration

Espenshade, Thomas J.; Calhoun, Charles A.

doi:10.1007/bf01074385

Cited by 255 publications

(143 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…To assess the effects of our experimental treatments on respondents' immigration policy preferences, we created three dichotomous treatment dummy variables to correspond to 47 E.g., Espenshade and Calhoun 1993;Passel and Fix 1994. 48 Sniderman, Hagendoorn, andPrior 2004.…”

Section: Results From the Survey-embedded Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Easing the Heavy Hand: Humanitarian Concern, Empathy, and Opinion on Immigration

Newman¹,

Hartman²,

Lown³

et al. 2013

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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The bulk of the public opinion research on immigration identifies the factors leading to opposition to immigration. In contrast, we focus on a previously unexplored factor yielding support for immigration: humanitarianism. Relying upon secondary analysis of national public opinion survey data and an original survey experiment, we demonstrate that humanitarian concern significantly decreases support for restrictive immigration policy. Results from our survey experiment demonstrate that in an information environment evoking both threat and countervailing humanitarian concern regarding immigration, the latter can and does override the former. Last, our results point to the importance of individual differences in empathy in moderating the effects of both threat and humanitarian inducements.

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Section: Results From the Survey-embedded Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Easing the Heavy Hand: Humanitarian Concern, Empathy, and Opinion on Immigration

Newman¹,

Hartman²,

Lown³

et al. 2013

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…22 Hopkins 2010. 23 Abowd and Freeman 1991Borjas and Freeman 1992;Citrin et al 1997;Espenshade and Calhoun 1993;Foner 1964;Higham 1988Higham [1955Olzak 1992;Gimpel 2000. 24 Gimpel andEdwards 1999;Harwood 1983;Lapinski et al 1997;Alexander 1993.…”

Section: The Sociotropic Economic Threat Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic and Cultural Drivers of Immigrant Support Worldwide

Valentino¹,

Soroka²,

Iyengar³

et al. 2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

155

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Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.The explosive rise in immigration worldwide over the last two decades has led to significant changes in the demographic composition of many developed countries. The political consequences of these shifts are profound, including the formation and electoral success of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe, the passage of the UK's referendum to leave the European Union, and now President Trump's drive to dramatically tighten US immigration policy after his election in 2016. Debates about threats posed by immigrants have become a regular feature of election campaigns, and were especially prominent in the 2016 US and 2017 Dutch elections. Then, as for many years before, political rhetoric about the issue was rife with cues highlighting both cultural differences between natives and newcomers, and the potentially negative economic consequences of increasing immigration. The causal antecedents of mass opinion about immigration have received some careful attention, but comprehensive, comparative analyses are still rare, and most such attempts are survey-based correlational studies rather than experiments that can isolate specific causal mechanisms. One core debate focuses on the economic versus ethno-cultural drivers of opposition to new immigrants in advanced industrial nations. In this article, we present results from the largest systematic, cross-national and controlled experimental study of these explanations to date.

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“…Negative behaviour towards immigrants has its roots in the fact that the native-born group perceives immigrants as social and economic threats to the locals (Haubert & Fussell, 2006:493). Studies conducted in Canada, the UK, the USA, Germany, and France have all reached the same conclusions--that the native-born perceive immigrants as a crime threat (Palmer, 1996), an economic threat (Scheve & Slaughter, 2001;Fetzer, 2000;Simon & Lynch 1999;Palmer, 1996;Quillian, 1995;Simon, 1993), or a cultural threat (Chandler & Tsai, 2001;Espenshade & Hemstead, 1996;Espenshade & Calhoun, 1993). When current events or a given social position make these threats more salient, an individual is more likely to view immigrants negatively.…”

Section: Disadvantages Of Migration 242mentioning

confidence: 88%