Pocketbook and Prejudice: The Influence of Economic and Demographic Threat on Immigration Attitudes

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 04. Attitudes about immigrants/immigration

Abstract

Many Americans who would benefit from increased immigration levels hold restrictive attitudes toward immigration policy. Most research emphasizes the inflexible nature of these attitudes (Kustov et al. 2021), but a growing line of recent survey experiments are surprisingly optimistic about moving them by addressing economic motivations (e.g. Facchini, Margalit, and Nakata 2022; Haaland and Roth 2020; Kustov 2025a). Still, we lack an understanding of how these treatments might play out in real-world contexts characterized by the demographic change that necessarily accompanies immigration. We know that latent prejudice can be activated by economic threat; but can informing people about the economic benefits of immigration overcome prejudice? Preliminary findings indicate that even in a state of increased demographic threat, information about the potential for immigration policy to address economic concerns causes respondents, and especially conservatives, to liberalize their views and express more interest in signing a pro-immigration petition.

Author

• Joey Dickinson, Washington University in St. Louis