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Both authors are affiliated with Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) which generously provided funding for the survey. We thank Alberto Abadie, George Borjas, Giovanni Facchini, Gordon Hanson, Gary King, David Lynch, Anna Mayda, Dani Rodrik, Ken Scheve, Matthew Slaughter, Dustin Tingley, the co-editors, and five anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.
Why do people oppose or favor immigration? Recent scholarly work examining survey data on individual attitudes toward immigration has generated inconsistent findings and no clear consensus view. Many studies suggest that opposition to immigration is primarily driven by noneconomic concerns associated with cultural and ethnic tensions between native and immigrant populations (Bauer, Lofstrom, and Zimmerman 2000; Burns and Gimpel 2000; Chandler and Tsai 2001; Citrin et al. 1997; Dustmann and Preston 2007; Espenshade and Hempstead 1996; Fetzer 2000; Gang, Rivera-Batiz, and Yun 2002; Lahav 2004; McLaren 2003). These studies emphasize noneconomic differences between individuals in terms of ethnocentrism and ideology in explaining attitudes toward immigrants and connect to an extensive body of empirical research indicating that material self-interest rarely plays a role in shaping people's opinions about major policy issues (Kinder and Sears 1981; Sears and Funk 1990; Sears et al. 1980).
A very different set of studies argue that material economic concerns lie at the heart of anti-immigrant sentiment and that individual attitudes toward immigration are profoundly shaped by fears about labor market competition (Kessler 2001; Mayda 2006; Scheve and Slaughter 2001) and/or the fiscal burden on public services (Facchini and Mayda 2009; Hanson 2005; Hanson, Scheve, and Slaughter 2007). Borjas (1999) identifies these as the two critical economic issues that have dominated the debate over immigration policy in the United States. Simon (1989) has identified them as the two key concerns motivating anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain. But there is no agreement among scholars about the relative impact of these different types of economic concerns or how they compare in importance with noneconomic considerations that also motivate anti-immigrant sentiment. Resolving these questions is critical for understanding public opposition to immigration and the growth of extremist, often violent, anti-immigrant political movements.
One reason there is no consensus on why people support or oppose immigration is that the data on individual attitudes are...