What Are the Drivers of Anti-Immigration Sentiment?

In Western countries, anti-immigration sentiment is becoming more and more widespread. In the United States, President Trump has issued executive orders imposing severe restrictions on arrivals, while in the European Union, the Syrian refugee crisis has sown division among member states. The free movement of persons may be at risk with populist agendas on the rise. In order to enrich the immigration policy debate, it is essential to understand the drivers of public opinion on this issue.

Economic theory has traditionally assumed that anti-immigration sentiment arises from fear of wage competition. Wage competition theory suggests that labor market competition causes resentment among native workers towards similarly-skilled immigrants. According to this framework, competition from a flow of low-skilled immigrants reduces wages and increases unemployment among the low-skilled labor force, while a flow of highly skilled immigrants produces similar consequences for the more highly skilled. A broader view, however, suggests that fiscal burden concerns may also drive attitudes against immigration. Tax concerns may provoke natives, regardless of their skills, to prefer highly skilled immigrants over low-skilled immigrants on the assumption that low-skilled immigrants will impose a net burden on public welfare services.

In a recent study, Elias Naumann, Lukas F. Stoetzer and Giuseppe Pietrantuono use evidence from surveys conducted in 15 countries before and after the 2014 Syrian refugee crisis to argue that fiscal burden concerns, not wage competition worries, drove anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe. The researchers randomly divide respondents into two groups and ask the first group how many “professionals” they would allow to live in their countries, while asking the second group how many “unskilled laborers” they would allow. The researchers then compare respondents’ answers to OECD data of “fiscal exposure to migration” in their country. Fiscal exposure is considered to be high in countries where immigrants receive, on average, more benefits than they contribute through taxes.

The researchers compare the results of the survey across respondents with different levels of education and wealth. The study shows that European natives preferred highly skilled over low-skilled immigrants regardless of their own skills or income. Although highly skilled natives were more willing to allow both types of immigration, they preferred highly skilled over low-skilled immigrants more than low-skilled natives did. In other words, when compared to low-skilled natives, highly skilled natives were found to have a higher “skill premium.”

By contrast, the labor market competition model would predict that natives support immigrants with different skill levels and oppose those with similar skill levels. But the contrary seems to be true. The authors conclude that in nine of the 15 countries surveyed, labor market motives did not drive attitudes towards migration. The authors also found that in countries where fiscal exposure to migration was high, the richest 20 percent of respondents displayed a particularly high preference for highly skilled immigrants.

The researchers conclude that tax concerns could be the main drivers of anti-immigration sentiment in Europe, and that those concerns could be stronger in countries with high fiscal exposure to migration. This may apply in the United States as well; a recent article based on a 2013 survey concludes that beliefs about tax burdens explain a large share of the difference in support for highly skilled versus low-skilled immigration. However, the authors conceded that “fiscal exposure” was too general a concept. They recommended that further studies should focus on specific aspects of welfare and taxation systems and on “whether populist party agendas affect the process of attitude formation and change.”

Given these results and the increasing share of citizens embracing anti-immigration beliefs, further research should be conducted to determine whether beliefs about the effects of immigration are based on facts or misconceptions. In any case, the public debate on immigration will be enriched with more substantive and detailed research on its economic and fiscal effects.

Article source: Nauman, Elias, Lukas F. Stoetzer, and Giuseppe Pietrantuono, “Attitudes towards highly skilled and low-skilled immigration in Europe: A survey experiment in 15 European countries,” European Journal of Political Research 57, Issue 4 (2018): 1009-1030.

Featured photo: cc/(AndreyPopov, photo ID: 921353784, from iStock by Getty Images)