Immigrants on Immigration: Evidence from 30 Years of Survey Data

• In Event: Immigrant Political Behavior

Abstract

More than 20 million people eligible to vote in the 2020 United States presidential election, or approximately one in ten eligible voters, were naturalized immigrants. Approximately 1 in 6 eligible British voters is an immigrant or first-generation resident. The naturalized share of the electorate is growing in virtually all industrialized democracies. Despite their political significance, both public mass opinion polling and academic social science routinely eschew measuring public opinion among immigrant populations to focus on native-born populations' attitudes. In this study, we draw on a series of long-running surveys from the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe that capture both attitudes about immigration laws and immigrants, focusing on the attitudes of foreign-born survey respondents and first-generation survey respondents. We find that support for immigration among immigrants is neither as uniform nor as high as press accounts have suggested. We use this descriptive evidence to interrogate three explanations of immigrants’ views on immigration: (1) assimilation of immigrants to the attitudes of the native-born; (2) cost-versus-benefit calculations about the impact of additional immigration on prior immigrants; and (3) beliefs about the circumstances or immigrant profile that make immigration beneficial versus harmful for the receiving society.

Authors

• Mayya Komisarchik, University of Rochester

• Bethany Lacina, University of Rochester