Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts—and to a lesser extent its economic impacts—on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when,...

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Public Attitudes Toward Immigration

This paper tests hypotheses concerning the effects of economic factors on public opinion toward immigration policy Using the 1992 and 1994 National Election Study surveys, probit models are employed to test diverse conceptualizations of the effects of economic adversity and anxiety on opposition to immigration The results indicate that personal economic circumstances play little role in opinion formation, but beliefs about the state of the national economy, anxiety over taxes, and generalized feelings about Hispanics and Asians, the major immigrant groups, are significant determinants of restrictionist sentiment. This restricted role of economic motives rooted in one's personal circumstances held true across ethnic groups, among residents in communities with different numbers of foreign-born, and in both 1992 and 1994.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2998640.pdf

Public Opinion Toward Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations

Recent studies of individual attitudes toward immigration emphasize concerns about labor-market competition as a potent source of anti-immigrant sentiment, in particular among less-educated or less-skilled citizens who fear being forced to compete for jobs with low-skilled immigrants willing to work for much lower wages. We examine new data on attitudes toward immigration available from the 2003 European Social Survey. In contrast to predictions based on conventional arguments about labor-market competition, which anticipate that individuals will oppose immigration of workers with similar skills to their own but support immigration of workers with different skill levels, we find that people with higher levels of education and occupational skills are more likely to favor immigration regardless of the skill attributes of the immigrants in question. Across Europe, higher education and higher skills mean more support for all types of immigrants. These relationships are almost identical among individuals in the labor force (that is, those competing for jobs) and those not in the labor force. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, then, the connection between the education or skill levels of individuals and views about immigration appears to have very little, if anything, to do with fears about labor-market competition. This finding is consistent with extensive economic research showing that the income and employment effects of immigration in European economies are actually very small. We find that a large component of the link between education and attitudes toward immigrants is driven by differences among individuals in cultural values and beliefs. More educated respondents are significantly less racist and place greater value on cultural diversity than do their counterparts; they are also more likely to believe that immigration generates benefits for the host economy as a whole.The authors would like to thank Beth Simmons, Shigeo Herano, Mike Tomz, James Alt, Jeffry Frieden, Ron Rogowski, Ken Scheve, Torben Iversen, Andy Baker, and Peter Gourevitch for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

https://web.stanford.edu/~jhain/Paper/IO2007.pdf

Educated Preferences: Explaining Attitudes Toward Immigration in Europe

Ninety percent of the differences across countries in total fertility rates are accounted for solely by differences in women's reported desired fertility. Using desired fertility constructed from both retrospective and prospective questions, together with instrumental variables estimation, it is shown this strong result is not affected by either ex-post rationalization of births nor the dependence of desired fertility on contraceptive access or cost. Moreover, despite the obvious role of contraception as a proximate determinant of fertility, the additional effect of contraceptive availability or family planning on fertility is quantitatively small and explains very little cross country variation. These empirical results are consistent with theories in which fertility is determined by parent's choices about children within the social, educational, economic, and cultural environment that parents, and especially women, face. They contradict theories that assert a large causal role for expansion of contraception in the reduction of fertility.

Desired fertility and the impact of population policies

"This article aims to contribute to an understanding of contemporary American attitudes toward immigration.... The paper uses data from a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted in June 1993. Respondents were asked whether they would like to see the level of immigration to the United States increased, decreased or kept the same. We test several hypotheses about factors influencing respondents' attitudes, including the importance of previously unexamined predictors. These new hypotheses relate to views about the health of the U.S. economy, feelings of social and political alienation, and isolationist sentiments concerning international economic issues and foreign relations. One important discovery is the close connection between possessing restrictionist immigration attitudes and having an isolationist perspective along a broader array of international issues."

Contemporary American attitudes toward U.S. immigration.

Public opinion toward illegal migration to the United States varies considerably across different segments of the population, but little is known about why some individuals hold more liberal attitudes than others. Several hypotheses are scattered throughout the research literature, but they have not been brought together in one place and tested using a common data set. Nor have the limited tests been satisfactory from a methodological standpoint. Instead of using multiple regression, typically analysts have relied on cross-tabulations of the data. This paper tests five hypotheses about attitudes toward illegal immigration and undocumented migrants using public opinion data from southern California. Only weak support is found for a labor market competition hypothesis. There is firmer evidence for hypotheses relating to cultural affinity between respondents and undocumented migrants and to the role of education. Respondents' evaluations of tangible costs and benefits to themselves also influence their assessments of illegal immigration. Finally, the results of this analysis provide additional support for a symbolic politics model of opinion formation when the model is extended to the issue of undocumented migration to the United States.

/pdf/an-analysis-of-public-opinion-toward-undocumented-3whcvesd8q.pdf

An analysis of public opinion toward undocumented immigration

This paper combines multi-state life-table analysis and the human capital model of wages to derive new estimates of the impact of children on hours of market work and earnings for American women aged 15 to 55. Panel data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience are used to estimate multi-state tables of working life and to assess the impact of fertility on female labour force behaviour. Potential earnings based on a human capital wage model are combined with the working life histories implied by the life-table analysis to estimate opportunity expenditures (i.e. the money value of foregone employment opportunities) associated with different childbearing patterns. The impacts of race, school enrolment, educational attainment, marital status, marital status changes, birth cohort and fertility are considered. Some specific findings are: (1) with identical childbearing patterns, white women forego roughly five times as much as black women in market earnings between the ages of 15 and 5...

Childbearing and Wives' Foregone Earnings

This paper presents estimates of the impact of the age pattern and level of fertility on the probability of labour force participation by married and cohabiting women in twelve Eastern and Western European countries and the United States Logit models for labour force participation probabilities are estimated conditional on age, age at marriage or union, educational attainment, current parity, and number of years in parity, using data on married and cohabiting women from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Comparative Study of World Fertility Surveys The estimated models are used to simulate the age profiles of labour force participation conditional on the level and timing of fertility The simulation results are presented in a series of charts grouped according to similarities in the effects of fertility on the age profiles of labour force participation Four distinct patterns are identified that depend on the empirical significance of distinct number-of-children and age-of-youngest-child effects The role of family policies and the extent to which the labour supply reductions associated with childbearing can be interpreted as opportunity costs are considered

The impact of children on the labour supply off married women: comparative estimates from European and U.S. data.

Variation by Social Class and Family Size How big a dent do children make in the family budget? Much more than most people think. New estimates of the dollars-and-cents impact of children over the entire course of childrearing to age 18 show that expenditures and forgone earnings total as much as $100,000 in 1981 dollars, before counting the costs of college. Direct, out-of-pocket spending for food, clothing, shelter, medical expenses, and the like account for most of this impact. But the less appreciated "opportunity" cost of raising children-principally the income mothers forgo by staying at home for a period of months or several years to care for their children-add an additional, substantial increment.'

Charles A. Calhoun

Papers

An analysis of public opinion toward undocumented immigration

Childbearing and Wives' Foregone Earnings

The impact of children on the labour supply off married women: comparative estimates from European and U.S. data.

The dollars and cents of parenthood

Childbearing and Wives' Foregone Earnings. Project Report.