Messaging and Immigration Attitudes: (How) Can They be Improved?

• In Event: Attitudes and Migrants

Abstract

Cross-national survey evidence consistently shows that a majority of citizens in most countries favor increased restrictions on immigration. If one believes that moving immigration policy in a more liberal direction requires greater societal support, at least in the democratic destination countries, then advocates of immigration openness need to consider how to make citizen attitudes less opposed in this issue-area. This paper explores the role of positive messaging about immigration as a means towards that end, presenting the results from both a survey and an experiment using a population-based sample of voting-age American citizens to be conducted in early 2019.

Our analysis begins with an assessment of why there is so much societal opposition to immigration. Is it based more on concerns related to 1) the economy, 2) the culture, or 3) national security? Certainly, many papers have sought to ascertain whether immigration opposition is driven more by economic or cultural concerns (the first and second frames), but the varied conclusions have often been based on comparing apples with oranges, or on non-parallel measures of the perceived economic versus cultural opportunity/threat posed by immigration. And even when more parallel measures have been used to compare these two frames (economics versus culture), a new frame of how immigrants threaten national security has entered the popular discourse, especially in the United States, and there is little evidence about how this concern is weighed by citizens compared to those about the economy and culture. Recognizing that the weight should be expected to vary across both time and space, we argue that it is important to know the dominant prevailing concern about immigration in order to know how to more effectively message to address anti-immigration attitudes. With directly parallel survey questions about how the respondent thinks immigration helps/hurts the economy, American culture, and national security, our expectation is that this third concern should be presently dominant, while the second concern is the weakest given the currently low unemployment rate in the United States.

Our experiment compares the effect of three different pro-immigration primes, presented with factual information to inform about how immigration has positive effects for 1) the US economy, 2) American culture, and 3) national security. Next to a control group that receives no positive information, these factual priming vignettes are randomly presented to a sample of voting-age Americans to see if (and by how much) they improve immigration attitudes. Our expectation is that factual information about how immigration helps the US economy should have little effect, but that information about how immigrants help national security by serving in the American armed forces has a larger positive effect on immigration attitudes. To the extent that this is true, we may have a basic recipe for positive messaging on immigration: find out on what basis citizens are concerned in this issue-area and then message directly towards that concern. Pro-immigration messages related to other less important concerns may not be expected to have much of an effect.

Authors

• David H. Bearce, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Ken Stallman, Rice University