Do attitudes about immigration predict willingness to admit individual immigrants? A cross-national test of the person-positivity bias
Shanto Iyengar, Simon Jackman, Solomon Messing, Nicholas Valentino, Toril Aalberg, Raymond Duch, Kyu S Hahn, Stuart Soroka, Allison Harell, Tetsuro Kobayashi (2013). Do attitudes about immigration predict willingness to admit individual immigrants? A cross-national test of the person-positivity bias. Public opinion quarterly.
Abstract
This paper demonstrates that citizens in seven advanced industrialized democracies generally oppose more open immigration policies, but stand ready to admit individual immigrants. Using an experimental design, we demonstrate the applicability of the “person-positivity bias” to immigration and investigate the effects of economic and cultural “deservingness” on evaluations of individual immigrants. Our results show that immigrants from professional backgrounds elicit higher levels of support than unskilled workers. The bias against unskilled workers is enlarged among immigrants accompanied by families. In comparison with occupational status and the number of family dependents, the target immigrant’s cultural attributes—as measured by Middle Eastern nationality and Afrocentric appearance—prove relatively inconsequential as criteria for evaluating immigrants.