Labour market competition and immigration attitudes in an established gateway

ABSTRACT

Although anti-immigrant sentiment is often attributed to economic competition with foreign-born workers, research has provided contradictory results. This paper combines survey and occupation data to re-examine the relationship between immigration attitudes and labour market competition in Houston, an established immigration gateway. I analyse data from multiple waves of the Houston Area Survey and the American Community Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and O*NET. Results indicate that labour market competition is associated with preferences for reducing immigration in Houston. Those working in occupations with recent increases in the number of foreign-born workers, that require less education, and that have higher rates of unemployment are more likely to prefer to reduce future legal immigration, even after controlling for perceived economic and cultural threats. These results support other research at the occupation and industry levels and suggest that labour market competition is a factor in shaping immigration attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration attitudes
• prejudice
• labour markets
• economic competition
• skills
• Houston

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful comments as well as Michael O. Emerson and Jie Wu of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University for their assistance with the Houston Area Survey Data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A split labour market might have no impact if the proportion of foreign-born workers in the occupation is very small. I tested for this possibility by including an interaction term in an exploratory model. There is no evidence that the split labour market variable has a different effect depending on the size of the foreign-born population.

2. Additional exploratory analyses provide support for the idea that labour market competition has a stronger impact on anti-immigrant sentiment during periods of economic decline. The logged unemployment rate, for example, has the strongest effect in 2009. The effects for cultural threat variables, by contrast, are more consistent across years. Small sample sizes for some years, however, limit the utility of such comparisons.