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Category: Project

Description: Prior work on immigration attitudes has focused on how economic self-interest, racial prejudice and preservation of cultural norms lead natives to harbor opposition and negative sentiment toward immigrants (Hainmuller and Hopkins 2014). In an innovative conjoint experiment having respondents choose between two hypothetical immigrants with randomized characteristics, Hainmuller and Hopkins (2015) find that Americans seem to prefer educated immigrants with high-status jobs more, while non-working, non-English speaking immigrants are less preferred, and that there is little variation in this preference across respondent education, ethnocentrism, and partisanship. Despite the significant contribution of this study, work often omits another factor that ought to impact how respondents view the immigrants in question; proximity to the respondent. A substantial literature on NIMBYism (Not-in-my-backyard) demonstrates that respondents express preferences that differ when primed at the national level than when primed at the local level (e.g. Hankinson, 2018). Following this logic, this study contributes by assessing whether the immigration consensus holds when accounting for the proximity of the immigrant to the respondent. We argue that citizens’ immigration preferences are conditional on whether they themselves think they will directly feel the impact of immigration and the priors one draws on when evaluating choices depend on not only on the characteristics of who they are evaluating but how it would affect the respondent’s livelihood.