ABSTRACT
Why do people oppose or favor immigration? Recent scholarly work examining survey data on individual attitudes towards immigration has generated inconsistent findings and no clear consensus view. Many studies suggest that opposition to immigration is primarily driven by noneconomic concerns associated with cultural and ethnic tensions between native and immigrant populations (Espenshade and Hempstead 1996; Citrin et al. 1997; Bauer, Lofstrom, and Zimmerman 2000; Burns and Gimpel 2000; Fetzer 2000; Chandler and Tsai 2001; Gang, Rivera-Batiz, and Yun 2002; McLaren 2003; Lahav 2004; Dustmann and Preston 2007). These studies emphasize noneconomic differences between individuals in terms of ethnocentrism and ideology in explaining attitudes towards immigrants and connect to an extensive body of empirical research indicating that material self-interest rarely plays a role in shaping people’s opinions about major policy issues (Sears et al. 1980; Kinder and Sears 1981; Sears and Funk 1990).
