Attitudes Toward Immigration: Ethnicity Trumps Skills But Not Legality?

Abstract

Objective: The objectives of this study were to parse the effect of ethnicity as a potential driver of public perception of immigrants from previous finding on the labor market competition hypothesis (e.g., Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2015). Methods: We rely on survey experiments to analyze the effect of ethnicity on attitude formation toward immigrants. In a first experiment, we test whether favoritism for high-skilled immigrants diminishes when we add the Hispanic descriptor. In a second experiment, we examine whether public opinion toward undocumented immigrants is affected by region of origin. Results: We find that favoritism for high-skilled immigrants drops when we add the Hispanic descriptor, but that legal status outweighs any possible anti-Hispanic sentiment. Conclusion: Our study provides a novel setup to study the interaction between economic factors and ethnicity as drivers of attitudes toward immigration among California's voters. We find some evidence that supports our hypothesis that anti-Hispanic sentiment drives attitude formation toward immigrants and immigration.