Attitudes to Immigrants in Ireland: Trends in Immigration and the Business Cycle

• In Event: 4151 - International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 14: Global Migration I

Abstract

Ireland experienced the ups and downs of a full business cycle in the twenty-first century, from boom up to 2008, to deep recession (2008-2012), and recovery since 2013. The boom led to a sharp increase in inward migration, the recession to some decline in the immigrant population, and the recovery to renewed immigration. Ireland thus represents an interesting case in which to examine macro-level explanations of changes in the attitudes of the indigenous population to immigrants. This paper focuses on two such explanations for patterns and trends in attitudes to immigrants: (1) the ‘economic competition’ approach, which emphasises the impact of macro-economic trends in general, and labour market conditions in particular; and (2) the ‘ethnic/cultural conflict’ approach, which asserts the importance of the scale of immigration or the relative size of the immigrant population.
The paper draws on a range of questions about people’s perceptions and attitudes to immigrants collected in each wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) between 2002 and 2019. We develop multivariate models of attitudes to migration, controlling for relevant covariates from the ESS data. Our models also combine the ESS data with macro-level indicators to capture the business cycle (unemployment) as well as trends in the scale of immigration (stocks differentiated by region of origin).

Authors

• Philip J. O'Connell, University College Dublin

• Daniel Capistrano, University College Dublin