As European countries that used to be the countries of emigration transform into countries of immigration, their policymakers, mass media, and general public increasingly turn their attention to the experience of the United States-historically a country of immigration. The United States, in turn, pays more attention to the immigration debate in modern Europe, as it recognizes the similarities between its own and European immigration issues. Transatlantic perspectives on immigration are becoming a highlight of the contemporary immigration debate-a trend refl ected both in scholarly literature 1 and in media narratives. 2

The notion of the immigration debate implies that the ways of thinking, writing, and talking about immigration issues are as important as the issues themselves. The discourse of immigration constructed and reproduced by three actors-policymakers, the mass media, and the public-receives a great deal of attention on both sides of the Atlantic. While all three actors are interconnected, two-policymakers and the mass media-depend on the public as the electorate for the former and the audience for whom to produce content for the latter. Since, as noted in Schain’s and Citrin’s chapters, the immigration debate has been closely tied to electoral politics both in the United States and in Europe, 3 there have been continuous efforts to assess public opinion on issues of immigration. Researchers have mostly used surveys and polls. However, scholars also noted that one of the biggest challenges of using surveys for gauging public opinion on immigration issues is that many questions in those surveys address racial and ethnic prejudice. The growing power of political correctness in Western democracies “trains” people to give answers that are socially desirable or at least socially acceptable, 4 posing a challenge for researchers seeking to “elicit respondents’ true level of prejudice.” 5 As Elizabeth Bird put it, “[survey studies] showed that by the end of the late twentieth century, [people] knew how to give an appropriate response to a survey on racial attitudes.” 6 Political pollster Jeremy Rosner also notes that “polls . . . often obscure the contours of intensity in attitudes that can be even more important to electoral leaders than the aggregate balance of opinion.” 7 Rosner adds that “this is particularly important on [immigration] issue, where passions run

high.” 8 John Durham Peters, in his discussion of the historical tensions in the nature of public opinion, argues that public opinion research “takes the public out of the public opinion.” 9 In other words, the “machinery of polling” takes away the power of opinion production from the citizens and transfers it to the experts (the pollsters), who produce polls that become “symbols of public opinion.” 10 Thus, public opinion research overlooks such elements of public opinion formation as discussion and deliberation, which, at least according to Jurgen Habermas and his theory of the public sphere, are crucial for a democratic process of decision making where the public, the media, and the policymakers are involved, at least in theory, on equal terms.