Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact

2013/01/28 by Neil Malhotra, Yotam Margalit, Cecilia Hyunjung Mo · 471 citations
Social Sciences · #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Immigration #Opposition (politics) #Demographic economics #Competition (biology) #Market competition #Variation (astronomy) #Economics #Political science #Politics #Market economy #Law

paper · doi:10.1111/ajps.12012

published in American Journal of Political Science 57(2), 391-410 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2013/01/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25

Abstract

What explains variation in individuals’ opposition to immigration? While scholars have consistently shown cultural concerns to be strong predictors of opposition, findings regarding the labor‐market competition hypothesis are highly contested. To help understand these divergent results, we distinguish between the prevalence and conditional impact of determinants of immigration attitudes. Leveraging a targeted sampling strategy of high‐technology counties, we conduct a study of Americans’ attitudes toward H‐1B visas. The plurality of these visas are occupied by Indian immigrants, who are skilled but ethnically distinct, enabling us to measure a specific skill set (high technology) that is threatened by a particular type of immigrant (H‐1B visa holders). Unlike recent aggregate studies, our targeted approach reveals that the conditional impact of the relationship in the high‐technology sector between economic threat and immigration attitudes is sizable. However, labor‐market competition is not a prevalent source of threat and therefore is generally not detected in aggregate analyses.

Citations

• Educated Preferences: Explaining Attitudes Toward Immigration in Europe
• Racial Priming Revived
• Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics
• Is There a (Viable) Crucial-Case Method?
• Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: I. An improved scoring algorithm.
• Economic Insecurity, Prejudicial Stereotypes, and Public Opinion on Immigration Policy
• Public Opinion Toward Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations
• Immigrant Inflows, Native Outflows, and the Local Labor Market Impacts of Higher Immigration
• Support for Free Trade: Self-Interest, Sociotropic Politics, and Out-Group Anxiety
• American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory
• Is the New Immigration Really so Bad?
• The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping: Reexamining the Impact of Immigration on the Labor Market
• Four Systems of Policy, Politics, and Choice
• Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States
• Who Is Against Immigration? A Cross-Country Investigation of Individual Attitudes toward Immigrants

Cited by

• Public Attitudes Toward Immigration
• Has Opposition to Immigration Increased in the United States after the Economic Crisis? An Experimental Approach
• Imported Inequality? Immigration and Income Inequality in the American States
• Opposition to immigration [wikipedia]