A Sometimes Hidden Economic Dimension to Individual Immigration Preferences: Cross-National Evidence in Support of the Labor Competition Hypothesis

Abstract

This paper seeks to restore labor competition as an explanation for anti-immigration attitudes, recognizing that education may proxy both individual-level skill and cultural socialization. We thus need new tests to distinguish the effect of education based on skill from that due to socialization. If the education effect is consistent with these relationships, then we can have greater confidence that it is capturing the former and not simply the latter. This paper thus develops and conducts a new test, using data from the International Social Survey Program’s National Identity Survey fielded in 2013 across thirty-two countries. From a factoral framework, our test identifies three national-level factors that should influence how much labor market pressure lower skilled citizens feel from immigration: the quantity of immigrants, the direction of capital/investment flows, and the amount of trade protection. These national-level factors are interacted with individual-level education, showing that the attitudinal differences based on education increase with more immigrants but decrease with greater investment inflows and increased trade protection. These results demonstrate why this economic dimension may sometimes be hidden: in national contexts where there are few immigrants, capital follows labor, and/or there is trade protection, labor competition as a driver of anti-immigration preferences should lessen.