The Stability of Immigration Attitudes: Evidence and Implications

• In Event: Understanding Attitudes toward Immigration, Deportation, and Refugees

Abstract

While a lot is known about what explains the contemporary variation in individual immigration attitudes, the literature has so far been rather ambiguous regarding the reality of their stability or change. To remedy this omission, we first lay out theoretical expectations of why (or why not) immigration attitudes on the individual level can be stable across time. Second, we collect the most comprehensive longitudinal datasets from major high-income democracies and outline our empirical strategy to answer the stability question. Third, we analyze the available data and demonstrate remarkably high individual correlations across time, as well as the robustness of immigration attitudes to various exogenous shocks. Overall, while some scholars are skeptical that voters may even have coherent policy preferences, immigration attitudes–or at least beliefs and motivations behind them–instead seem to be remarkably durable. In the end, we discuss the implications of high attitude stability for the immigration politics literature, including preference determinants and possibilities for changing voters’ mind on the issue, as well as explanations for the rise of anti-immigration parties.

Authors

• Cassidy S Reller, UCSD

• Dillon L Laaker, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Alexander Kustov, Princeton University