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Left Out: How Political Ideology Affects Support for Migrants in Colombia
... Immigration can also lead to a public backlash among voters, potentially resulting in political instability, for example, in the case of Brexit or the rise of right-wing parties in the European Union (Barone et al. 2016;Dustmann et al. 2019;Steinmayr 2021). A diaspora whose political views may, in parts, be strongly shaped by extreme views of origin-country leaders (or be perceived as such), take, for example, Erdogan or Putin, can add to the potentially negative effects of migration on geopolitics (Holland et al. 2024;Rozo and Vargas 2021). ...
... In countries like the United States, Americanness has been long associated with the Protestant work ethic, property ownership, and the ability to control one's labor; thus, a few studies highlight material consumption or economic markers as part of being American (Bloemraad 2013;Park 2005;Warikoo and Bloemraad 2018). Even in contexts in which migrants largely share the same racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds as the majority destination society, political elites can emphasize differences in order to exclude, such as the case of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia being labeled as a growing "leftist threat" (Holland, Peters, and Zhou 2023). In short, prior research identifies diverse boundaries that immigrants and their children face-boundaries that can be drawn by language, religion, citizenship, race, culture, economic condition, political ideology, or other markers of difference. ...
Much opposition to migration centers on worries that migrants are too culturally and socially different from the host population, that they will fail to integrate, or that they will change the demographics and culture of a destination society too dramatically. In both public and academic discourse, there is a tendency to assume that the “problem” of sociocultural integration is one of “cultural distance,” understood as an objective and measurable fact, and hence that the “solution” is to reduce cultural distance. This paper offers an alternative
diagnosis and prescription. Whether an immigrant group is perceived as culturally close or culturally distant is not a product of objective differences. Rather, such perceptions arise out of complex boundary-making processes in which certain points of commonality and difference are highlighted while other points of
similarity and difference are ignored or denied. These boundary-making processes are historically contingent, institutionally mediated, and politically constructed in ways that open up paths for certain immigrant groups while putting up barriers to others. The paper also argues that insofar as there are cultural
differences, they are not always a “problem” for integration; successful integration does not require cultural assimilation or cultural convergence. There are a wide range of models of integration that involve various forms and combinations of cultural maintenance, cultural adaptation, and cultural convergence. The paper concludes by discussing a few strategies for improving migrant integration, including interpersonal interventions aimed at changing the attitudes and beliefs of members of destination societies, recasting national narratives to be more inclusive, and promoting policies or programs to enhance migrant minorities’
ability to exercise political agency and voice.
What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.
Introducción:
En este artículo se propone una reflexión sobre la construcción mediática y política de la imagen del migrante venezolano como amenaza a la salud y seguridad pública en Colombia.
Desarrollo:
A partir de 2015, la migración masiva de venezolanos enfrenta a la sociedad colombiana a una situación inédita en su historia reciente. En medio de un contexto atravesado por la hiperpolitización de las relaciones entre ambos países, miles de migrantes se han encontrado con la estigmatización en una sociedad que desarrolla mecanismos para contener las posibles 'amenazas' que representa su movilidad. Para tales fines, este artículo aborda tanto noticias e imágenes de diferentes medios de comunicación, como discursos políticos y noticias falsas que circulan mediante cadenas de WhatsApp que, en su conjunto, terminan por afianzar la percepción de amenaza en distintos sectores de la sociedad colombiana.
Conclusiones:
Las políticas de solidaridad y ayuda que pregona el Estado van de la mano con mensajes contradictorios producidos en los medios que, en últimas, le presentan al público a una población indiferenciada que pone en peligro al cuerpo de la nación.
Today, people are moving from countryside to city, city to city, and country to country at one of the highest rates in human history. Globalization, poverty, war, persecution, and environmental crises—as well as the pursuit of safety and better economic opportunities—are propelling a mass migration of people from the Global South to the Global North. In response, some countries have limited immigration directly or restricted certain rights and privileges to discourage immigrants. Conversely, other countries have provided refuge and expanded pathways to rights and benefits out of altruism and humanity, economic self-interest, or both. As the pace of global migration has increased, the idea that political rights should follow or accompany immigrants has also grown and gained traction. Voting is one such right. Most countries typically limit voting rights to its citizens. However, during the past several decades, some have extended the franchise to noncitizen residents. In fact, at least forty-five countries presently allow noncitizen residents to vote in their local, regional, or even national elections. What is driving the expansion of noncitizen voting (NCV)? Where and to what ends are such policies being enacted? For this article, the authors conducted a systematic review to examine these questions and assess the implications of enfranchisement for advancing immigrant incorporation and democratic practice.
Following a sharp increase in the number of border arrivals from the violence-torn countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the spring and summer of 2014, the United States quickly implemented a strategy designed to prevent such surges by enhancing its detention and deportation efforts. In this article, we examine the emigration decision for citizens living in the high-crime contexts of northern Central America. First, through analysis of survey data across Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, we explore the role crime victimization plays in leading residents of these countries to consider emigration. Next, using survey data collected across twelve municipalities in Honduras, we evaluate the extent to which knowledge of heightened US immigration deterrence efforts influenced respondents’ emigration decision. Though a vast majority of these respondents were aware of the stricter US immigration policy regime, this awareness had no effect on their consideration of emigration as a viable strategy.
Experimental studies on immigration attitudes have been conducted overwhelmingly in Western countries and have focused on immigrant admission and naturalization, neglecting deportation as a possible outcome. In a survey experiment in Côte d’Ivoire, where immigrants represent more than one-tenth of the population, we randomized attributes of hypothetical immigrants to determine which factors influenced respondents’ support for naturalization or deportation compared with staying in the country without citizenship. Support for naturalization was shaped by several expected economic and social attributes, while deportation preferences were influenced primarily by the immigrant’s legal status and level of savings. Cultural proximity produced mixed results, with respondents less likely to support the naturalization of immigrants from neighboring African countries but also less likely to deport immigrants with whom they shared a religious faith. Finally, respondents were more likely to support the naturalization of immigrants who planned to vote if granted citizenship, especially when they were of the same religion as the respondent, indicating a degree of electoral calculation in a context where voting patterns are associated with religious identities. Together, these findings suggest that citizen preferences for naturalization and deportation are influenced by somewhat different factors, a possibility that warrants further testing in other contexts.
Rapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long-term residents, manifested in labor market discrimination, political nativism, and violence. We implemented a novel, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of Mumbai's population to elucidate the causes of anti-migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self-interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat crosscut. We introduce a new political mechanism to explain this divergence. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in-migration by coethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving "safety in numbers." Our article sheds light on the drivers of preferences over internal migration. It also contributes insights to the international immigration literature and to policy debates over urban expansion.
A consensus in Europe about asylum seekers
Violent conflicts between groups often generate large numbers of noncombatant refugees. Bansak et al. surveyed western European attitudes toward such asylum seekers. They found that voters favor applicants who will contribute to the recipient country's economy, who have suffered severe physical or mental distress rather than economic hardship, and who are Christian rather than Muslim. These preferences are similar across countries and independent of the voters' personal characteristics.
Science , this issue p. 217
In this short commentary, we examine images and words shared on the Twitter hashtag #refugeesNOTwelcome to understand the portrayal of male Syrian refugees in a post-9/11 context where the Middle-Eastern male is often primarily cast as a potential terrorist. Queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2007) and Middle- East scholar Paul Amar (2011) provide us with a theoretical approach to make sense of the contradictions we see emerging in this social media context.
Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives’ attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts—and to a lesser extent its economic impacts—on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when, and why they matter for attitude formation.
This article assesses the influence of material interests and cultural identities on European opinion about immigration. Analysis of respondents in twenty countries sampled in the 2002-03 European Social Survey demonstrates that they are unenthusiastic about high levels of immigration and typically overestimate the actual number of immigrants living in their country. At the individual level, cultural and national identity, economic interests and the level of information about immigration are all important predictors of attitudes. 'Symbolic' predispositions, such as preferences for cultural unity, have a stronger statistical effect than economic dissatisfaction. Variation across countries in both the level and the predictors of opposition to immigration are mostly unrelated to contextual factors cited in previous research, notably the amount of immigration into a country and the overall state of its economy. The ramifications of these findings for policy makers are discussed in the context of current debates about immigration and European integration.
This paper examines the political attributes of emigrants and how their departure affects the electoral outcomes in their home countries. I argue that emigrants are different from those who remain in their political preferences as well as economic attributes, such that large-scale emigration changes the distribution of voters in sending countries. Emigration can also directly affect the policy preferences of individuals who stay in their home countries. I test these arguments in seven Central and Eastern European countries, using individual-level surveys and region-level data on emigration and elections. To address potential endogeneity issues, I use instrumental variable analysis, leveraging the surge of Polish emigration to the United Kingdom after the EU enlargement. I find that emigrants from Central and Eastern Europe tend to be younger, highly educated, and politically more progressive and that the vote shares of far-right parties are larger in regions with higher emigration rates. Also, I find that exposure to large-scale emigration affects the vote choices of individuals who remain.
How can we elicit honest responses in surveys? Conjoint analysis has become a popular tool to address social desirability bias (SDB), or systematic survey misreporting on sensitive topics. However, there has been no direct evidence showing its suitability for this purpose. We propose a novel experimental design to identify conjoint analysis’s ability to mitigate SDB. Specifically, we compare a standard, fully randomized conjoint design against a partially randomized design where only the sensitive attribute is varied between the two profiles in each task. We also include a control condition to remove confounding due to the increased attention to the varying attribute under the partially randomized design. We implement this empirical strategy in two studies on attitudes about environmental conservation and preferences about congressional candidates. In both studies, our estimates indicate that the fully randomized conjoint design could reduce SDB for the average marginal component effect (AMCE) of the sensitive attribute by about two-thirds of the AMCE itself. Although encouraging, we caution that our results are exploratory and exhibit some sensitivity to alternative model specifications, suggesting the need for additional confirmatory evidence based on the proposed design.
Building on research about political determinants of migration attitudes, this study examines whether public opinion is influenced by the potential political participation of migrants themselves. We use the opportunity presented by the recent increase in the number of US citizens moving from Puerto Rico to the mainland to investigate how partisanship and political calculations shape attitudes toward their migration. Using data from an online survey experiment in early 2020, we find partisan differences in support for Puerto Rican migration. Democrats were significantly more likely than Republicans and independents to support Puerto Rican migration to the mainland in the aftermath of recent natural disasters, while Republicans were more likely to support Puerto Ricans returning home for the rebuilding process. The partisan divide was exacerbated when respondents were given additional information about the voting eligibility of Puerto Ricans and the possibility that their votes could help a Democratic presidential candidate win the state of Florida in the 2020 election. Specifically, Republicans who received this information were significantly less likely than all other respondents, including Republicans in the control group, to support Puerto Rican migration to the mainland USA. Findings on several related variables also show significant partisan differences, though treatment effects are less pronounced. Although further research is necessary to determine whether similar patterns hold in situations where migrants are not immediately eligible to vote or perceived as supporting one side, this study provides initial evidence that strategic partisan calculations can influence attitudes toward migration in a competitive political context.
We study the electoral effects of the arrival of 1.3 million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia as a consequence of the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis. We exploit the fact that forced migrants disproportionately locate in places with earlier settlements of Venezuelans after the intensification of the crisis. We find that larger migration shocks increase voter's turnout and shift votes from left-to right-wing political ideologies. These effects are predominantly driven by voter's concerns on the economic effects of migrants as well as by a novel channel that we call strategic electoral misinformation, whereby political parties make the forced migration shock salient to voters in order to demonize the political agenda of competitors.
How do migrants decide when to leave? Conventional wisdom is that violence and economic deprivation force migrants to leave their homes. However, long-standing problems of violence and poverty often cannot explain sudden spikes in migration. We study the timing of migration decisions in the critical case of Syrian and Iraqi migration to Europe using an original survey and embedded experiment, as well as interviews, focus groups, and Internet search data. We find that violence and poverty lead individuals to invest in learning about the migration environment. Political shifts in receiving countries then can unleash migratory flows. The findings underscore the need for further research on what migrants know about law and politics, when policy changes create and end migrant waves, and whether politicians anticipate migratory responses when crafting policy.
Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents’ favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). They measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents’ support for the overall profile relative to a baseline, averaging across all respondents and other features. While the AMCE has a clear causal interpretation (about the effect of features), most published conjoint analyses also use AMCEs to describe levels of favorability. This often means comparing AMCEs among respondent subgroups. We show that using conditional AMCEs to describe the degree of subgroup agreement can be misleading as regression interactions are sensitive to the reference category used in the analysis. This leads to inferences about subgroup differences in preferences that have arbitrary sign, size, and significance. We demonstrate the problem using examples drawn from published articles and provide suggestions for improved reporting and interpretation using marginal means and an omnibus F-test. Given the accelerating use of these designs in political science, we offer advice for best practice in analysis and presentation of results.
Previous research shows that people commonly exaggerate the size of minority populations. Theories of intergroup threat predict that the larger people perceive minority groups to be, the less favorably they feel toward them. We investigate whether correcting Americans’ misperceptions about one such population—immigrants—affects related attitudes. We confirm that non-Hispanic Americans overestimate the percentage of the population that is foreign-born or in the United States without authorization. However, in seven separate survey experiments over 11 years, we find that providing accurate information does little to affect attitudes toward immigration, even though it does reduce the perceived size of the foreign-born population. This is true even when people’s misperceptions are explicitly corrected. These results call into question a potential cognitive mechanism that could underpin intergroup threat theory. Misperceptions about the size of minority groups may be a consequence, rather than a cause, of attitudes toward those groups. © 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
Migration and nativism are explosive issues in Europe and North America. Less well-known is the tumult that soaring migration is creating in the politics of developing countries. The key difference between anti-migrant politics in developed and developing countries is that domestic migration - not international migration - is the likely focus of nativist politics in poorer countries. Nativists take up the cause of sub-national groups, vilifying other regions and groups within the country as sources of migration. Since the 1970s, the majority of less-developed countries have adopted policies that aim to limit internal migration. This Element marshals evidence from around the world to explore the colliding trends of internal migration and nativism. Subnational migration is associated with a boom in nativist politics. Pro-native public policy and anti-migrant riots are both more likely when internal migration surges. Political decentralization strengthens subnational politicians' incentives and ability to define and cater to nativists.
What determines citizens’ freedom to exit autocracies? How does this influence global patterns of migration and democratization? Although control over citizen movement has long been central to autocratic power, modern autocracies vary considerably in how much they restrict emigration. This article shows that autocrats strategically choose emigration policy by balancing several motives. Increasing emigration can stabilize regimes by selecting a more loyal population and attracting greater investment, trade and remittances, but exposing their citizens to democracy abroad is potentially dangerous. Using a half-century of bilateral migration data, the study calculates the level and destinations of expected emigration given exogenous geographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It finds that when citizens disproportionately emigrate to democracies, countries are more likely to democratize – and that autocrats restrict emigration freedom in response. In contrast, a larger expected flow of economic emigration predicts autocratic survival and freer emigration policy. These results have important implications for autocratic politics, democratic diffusion and the political sources of migration.
Despite rapid urbanization across the Global South, identity politics within rural-urban migrant communities remains understudied. Past scholarship is divided over whether village-based ethnic divisions will erode or deepen within diverse poor migrant populations. I assess these divergent predictions through an 'ethnographic survey experiment' (N=4,218) among unique samples of poor migrants in India. Contra conventional expectations, I find intra-class ethnic divisions are neither uniformly transcended nor entrenched across key arenas of migrant life. Instead, I observe variation consistent with situational theories predicting ethnic divisions will be muted only in contexts triggering a common identity among migrants. I pinpoint urban employers and politicians as these triggers. Poor migrants ignore ethnic divisions when facing these elites, who perceive and treat them in class terms. However, migrants remain divided in direct interactions with each other. These bifurcated findings imply poor migrants may be available for both class-based and ethnic mobilization in the city.
On September 6, 1901, a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. This paper places the suppression of anarchists and the exclusion and deportation of foreigners in the aftermath of the “shot that shocked the world” within the context of international anti-anarchist efforts, and reveals that President McKinley's assassination successfully pulled the United States into an existing global conversation over how to combat anarchist violence. This paper argues that these anti-anarchist restrictions and the suppression of expression led to the emergence of a “free speech consciousness” among anarchists, and others, and to the formation of the Free Speech League, predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Challenging governmental suppression transformed anarchists' identities from violent criminals to free speech defenders. This paper also explores the history, passage, and implementation of the Alien Immigration Act of 1903, which barred and expelled anarchists, those associated with anarchists, and those advocating anarchism, and became the first federal law authorizing the exclusion or deportation of foreigners based on their ideological beliefs, associations, and/or expressions. In United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams (1904), the Supreme Court affirmed the deportation of British philosophical anarchist John Turner and upheld the Alien Act's constitutionality, establishing the precedent for future ideological restrictions of foreigners. This legal precedent paved the way for the mass deportations of radicals after the 1919 Palmer Raids, the exclusion of alleged communist writers, actors, and professors under the McCarran Act of 1950 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and eventually for a visa denial barring entry to an Islamic scholar under the Patriot Act of 2001.
Political misperceptions can distort public debate and undermine people's ability to form meaningful opinions. Why do people often hold these false or unsupported beliefs, and why is it sometimes so difficult to convince them otherwise? We argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the effectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures. We discuss factors known to affect the prevalence of directionally motivated reasoning and assess strategies for accurately measuring misperceptions in surveys. Finally, we address the normative implications of misperceptions for democracy and suggest important topics for future research.
How does social exclusion on the basis of racial/ethnic identity affect partisanship and political attitudes? Drawing on sociological research on the group basis of partisanship and psychological theories of social identity, we contend that exclusion at the individual level stemming from racial/ethnic group membership can affect political identity. People who feel that a political party excludes them from the American social fabric based on their race/ethnicity should be less likely to perceive that party as serving their group’s interests and therefore less likely to support that party. We apply our theory to Asian Americans, an understudied minority population that is becoming increasingly politically relevant. Through both a large-scale, representative survey and a novel laboratory experiment, we find empirical support for our principal hypothesis. Our findings partly explain why Asian Americans are overwhelmingly likely to identify as Democrats and advance an identity-oriented explanation of partisanship in American electoral politics.
What are the political consequences of international migration on the migrant's country of origin? To help understand this question, this review article first examines data and measurement issues that have hampered empirical analysis. It then lays out an analytical framework outlining four channels through which migration's political consequences play out: the prospective, absence, diaspora, and return channels. The article next delineates the variables that attenuate or amplify these effects and argues that unobservable characteristics, in particular who leaves and why, have an important influence on the type and intensity of political effects. Subsequently, the article examines some key political consequences of international migration: its political economy consequences; its impact on conflict; and its institutional effects, focusing on political institutions as well as nationalism and citizenship. The penultimate section points out the importance of temporality in understanding the political effects of international migration. The article concludes with some questions for future research.
Political elites often discuss racial/ethnic outgroups in a critical light. I claim this discourse raises the salience of group identity while impugning its worth, thus inducing differential political reactions among high and low identifying group members. Specifically, high identifiers will engage in political efforts that restore their identity’s positive value by displaying ingroup favoritism and challenging the source of their group’s devaluation. In contrast, low identifiers will actively decline political opportunities to bolster their group’s devalued status. Using a national survey experiment, I randomly assigned eligible but unregistered Latino voters to a control group without elite discourse; a non-devaluing condition with elite discourse focused on illegal immigration; or, a devaluing condition with elite discourse focused on illegal immigration and critical of illegal immigrants. High identifying Latinos in the devaluing condition expressed greater pro-Latino political attitudes and a stronger intention to register and vote in a pending presidential election. This dynamic was absent in the other conditions and unrelated to Latinos’ partisan identity. These results suggest an identity-to-politics link is robustly forged among high identifying group members when they sense a devaluation of their group.
To better evaluate the weight of economic versus cultural factors in determining individual attitudes toward open borders, this article reports on a survey experiment conducted over the course of the Great Recession. Over the course of the recession, we measured changes in attitudes on both immigration and trade policies, controlling for economic circumstance. Based on the data provided by respondents on both their current salaries as well as a subjective assessment of their economic well-being, we illustrate how both objective and subjective perceptions of the economy interact with cultural factors and influence attitudes on open borders. The panel provides a unique picture of the “stickiness” of policy attitudes in hard economic times, and by extension, the level of commitment in the United States to globalization.
Books reviewed in this article:
American Aurora: A democratic-Republican Returns. The Suppressed History of our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper that tried to Report it. By Richard N. Rosenfeld
Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic. By Michael Durey
Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. By Simon P. Newman
In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism 1776–1820. By David Waldstreicher.
Do economic considerations shape attitudes toward immigration? In this article, we consider the relationship between economic interests and immigration preferences by examining how developments in individuals’ sectors of employment affect these views. Using survey data across European countries from 2002 to 2009 and employing new measures of industry-level exposure to immigration, we find that sectoral economies shape opinions about immigration. Individuals employed in growing sectors are more likely to support immigration than are those employed in shrinking sectors. Moreover, the economic context matters: making use of the exogenous shock to national economies represented by the 2008 financial crisis, we show that sector-level inflows of immigrant workers have little effect on preferences when economies are expanding, but that they dampen support for immigration when economic conditions deteriorate and confidence in the economy declines. These sectoral effects remain even when controlling for natives’ views about the impact of immigration on the national economy and culture. When evaluating immigration policy, individuals thus appear to take into account whether their sector of employment benefits economically from immigration.
Do preferences toward globalization strategies vary across public-finance regimes? In this paper, we use data on individual preferences toward immigration and trade policy to examine how pre-tax and post-tax cleavages differ across globalization strategies and state fiscal jurisdictions. High exposure to immigrant fiscal pressures reduces support for freer immigration among U.S. natives, especially the more skilled. The magnitude of this post-tax fiscal cleavage is comparable to the pre-tax labor-market effects of skill itself. There is no public-finance variation in opinion over trade policy, consistent with U.S. trade policy having negligible fiscal-policy impacts. Public finance thus appears to shape opinions toward globalization strategies.
This paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants, within and across countries. The two survey data sets used, covering a wide range of developed and developing countries, make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country-level attributes. In particular, theory predicts that the correlation between pro-immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country. Skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise. Results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions. Noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes, but they don't alter significantly the labor-market results. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ISIS Fighters Hiding amongst Refugees Pose Terror Threat: Breedlove
- Richard Sisk