How Social Scientists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Immigration

• In Event: Methodological Advances in the Politics of Immigration and Refugees: Part 2

Abstract

How have the scholarly views about international migration developed over the past century? A lot is known about the trajectories of immigration preferences among ordinary people, as well as political, media, and business elites (e.g., Facchini and Steinhardt 2011, Abrajano and Hajnal 2015, Peters 2017). But the preferences of academic and intellectual elites—those who arguably generate and disseminate the very knowledge about international migration—have so far been overlooked. One of the understandable reasons for such omission has been the lack of relevant data availability (such as political speeches, bills, public opinion surveys or other historical records on the topic). To overcome this issue, we build on a comprehensive corpus of academic articles from major social science journals (1952-2014, N = 60000) and identify articles related to immigration. We estimate (1) the prevalence of positive sentiments toward immigration (and other issues) using a Transformer-based sentiment classification model (Vaswani et al., 2017; Liu et al. 2019) and (2) the topics of articles related to immigration among other issues across years and various disciplines using topic modeling. We then combine our resulting estimates with the historical cross-national measures of immigration policy openness (IMPIC), immigration media coverage (measured using English Gigaword), and immigration public opinion (Gallup, WVS). First, we show that immigration research has become increasingly positive toward the issue across disciplines (which has not been the case among other issues or social science articles in general). Second, we provide preliminary evidence that this positive change has preceded the liberalization of immigration policy, media coverage, and attitudes in high-income countries over the last several decades. Overall, our approach allows us to trace a remarkable and potentially consequential transformation of the academic discourse over the past century—from the negative framing of immigration as a “social problem” and “racial threat” to its positive framing as a “choice” and “opportunity.”

Authors

• Yaoyao Dai, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

• Alexander Kustov, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

• Benjamin J Radford, University of North Carolina at Charlotte