Do Anti-immigration Voters Care More? Documenting the Issue Importance Asymmetry of Immigration Attitudes

Abstract

Why do politicians and policymakers not prioritize pro-immigration reforms, even when public opinion on the issue is positive? This research note examines one previously overlooked explanation related to the systematically greater importance of immigration as a political issue among those who oppose it relative to those who support it. To provide a comprehensive empirical assessment of how personal immigration issue importance is related to policy preferences, I use the best available cross-national and longitudinal surveys from multiple immigrant-receiving contexts. I find that compared to pro-immigration voters, anti-immigration voters feel stronger about the issue and are more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important. This finding holds across virtually all observed countries, years, and alternative survey measures of immigration preferences and their importance. Overall, these results suggest that public attitudes toward immigration exhibit a substantial issue importance asymmetry that systematically advantages anti-immigration causes when the issue is more contextually salient.

The micro-foundations of social democratic welfare chauvinism and inclusion: class demand and policy reforms in Western Europe, 1980−2018

“…Finally, besides the existence of a class divide, our reasoning hinges on the assumption that both working-class and middle-class voters care enough about the social rights of immigrants to influence party position and behaviour. Whilst previous research has pointed to an asymmetry of issue importance regarding immigration (Kustov, 2022), we have empirical reasons to believe that both working and middle classes attribute importance to welfare chauvinism, although this importance is not measured in the ESS survey used here. In recent survey data from the UK, Germany, Sweden and Spain (Häusermann et al, 2020) respondents were asked how important it is to them when immigrants obtain the same welfare rights as citizens already living here.…”

The politicization of European integration and support for restrictive migration policies

“…Alternatively, the differential shifts may be a result of how important migration-related issues are to respondents. Existing work shows that pro-migration individuals simply care less about the issue than opponents of migration (Kustov, 2022). Accordingly, a lower level of ascribed importance may render attitudes more malleable.…”

Resurrecting Taboo Policies? Explaining Collective Regularisations for Unauthorised Immigrants During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Southern Europe

“…An important set of factors shaping immigration policy relate to the salience of immigration among people's concerns, and, relatedly, the relative insulation of policy makers from restrictionist public pressures. Knowing that a substantial share of the electorate is critical of immigration and that antiimmigration voters feel stronger about the issue than those who are pro-immigration (Dennison and Geddes 2019;Kustov 2021), we expect policy makers to be more cautious in settings where immigration is a salient issue. We provide a visual representation of the evolution of the salience of immigration in Greece, Italy, and Portugal in Figure 1 below.…”