‘Bloom where you’re planted’: explaining public opposition to (e)migration

ABSTRACT

Why is migration unpopular? A vast literature argues that voters oppose immigration because of threatened interests and prejudice. This paper is among the first studies of opposition to emigration – the other side of the issue salient in many countries. Departing from existing public opinion research, I develop a number of tests comparing emigration and immigration attitudes and then exploit relevant survey data from 30 countries, as well as original experimental and qualitative evidence. Overall, I document high opposition to both emigration and immigration in many countries and show that respondents are unlikely to confuse these issues. I then show that individual emigration and immigration attitudes are significantly correlated and have similar predictors, which is reflected in respondents’ own open-ended explanations. While consistent with sociotropic accounts, this new evidence suggests that many natives may exhibit an aversion to human mobility between countries in general, not immigration or emigration in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• Emigration
• immigration
• public opinion
• political psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to the YouGov survey from 19–24 November 2015.

2 According to Telegraph from 24 October 2016.

3 “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13).

4 Many scholars are, however, increasingly sceptical that “brain drain” is a problem to be solved pointing out to a number of practical and ethical issues, as well as to the countervailing effects of incentivizing education (for a review, see Clemens 2014; Sager 2014). For a general review of economic effects of emigration, see Leeson and Gochenour (2015). For normative considerations, see Stilz (2016).

5 Although self- and group-interest explanations are empirically distinct, in theory voters may advance their collective interests as a heuristic for their self-interest without being altruistic (Weeden and Kurzban 2017).

6 The dataset consists of representative samples including Armenia (2013), Azerbaijan (2013, 2015), Belarus (2013, 2015), Bulgaria (2015), Croatia (2015), Czech Republic (2015), Georgia (2013, 2015), Greece (2015), Hungary (2015), Kazakhstan (2013, 2015), Kyrgyzstan (2013, 2015), Moldova (2013), Poland (2015), Romania (2015), Russia (2013, 2015), Slovakia (2015), Tajikistan (2013, 2015), Ukraine (2013, 2015), Uzbekistan (2013, 2015). Given the absence of a proper survey infrastructure, the results from Turkmenistan (2013, 2015) – though seemingly not significantly different from neighbouring countries – are excluded from the analysis.

7 While these items do not specify particular government interventions, I follow the immigration literature and assume that they are indicative of related policy attitudes.

8 This includes gender, age, marriage status, residency, nativity, education, income and unemployment.

9 The full list of countries is as follows: France (2013, 2014), Germany (2013, 2014), Greece (2014), Italy (2013, 2014), the Netherlands (2013, 2014), Poland (2013, 2014), Portugal (2013, 2014), Romania (2013), Russia (2014), Slovakia (2013), Spain (2013, 2014), Sweden (2013, 2014), Turkey (2013, 2014), the United Kingdom (2013, 2014) and the United States (2013, 2014).

10 For public opposition to migration in all samples separately, see Figure A1 in Appendix.

11 Azerbaijan and Armenia are henceforth excluded from the individual-level analysis since both of these emigrant-sending countries have virtually no immigration and the related opposition to it (see Figure 1).

12 Another potential concern about this analysis is that the respondents in all samples are by definition the ones who did not emigrate. It is unclear, however, whether this might bias the observed correlation between emigration and immigration attitudes upward or downward. In the end, while it is true that migrants appear to be slightly more supportive of both emigration and immigration (see Table 1), migration preferences are equally correlated among the native-born and foreign-born populations (r = 0.37). Consequently, the absence of current emigrants among the respondents is unlikely to significantly bias the correlation estimates.

13 While in most languages the terms ‘immigration’ and ‘emigration’ are pronounced and spelled similarly to English (with a difference in a prefix or a suffix), some languages use either the same or a completely different word for these processes. Depending on one’s language, people may thus be more or less likely to confuse emigration and immigration. Nonetheless, language differences can only explain a part of between-country – not within-country – variation.

14 The widespread popular opposition to migration in the UK has been often linked to the relative success of the euroskeptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the ‘Leave’ vote in the 2016 EU referendum (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017).

15 As a part of larger research project, this diverse national sample targeted to match census demographics was obtained from the initial pool of 2050 respondents after accounting for response quality (attention check and survey completion) and excluding non-citizens. The inclusion of all respondents in the analysis, however, does not affect the results (not shown). The employed Qualtrics panel was representative of the population across most important demographic and political characteristics (see Table A2 for summary statistics).

16 Relatedly, those who oppose emigration are also more likely to report voting Leave in the 2016 EU referendum (r = 0.18), even after accounting for major demographic covariates (not shown).

17 While more qualitative and quantitative text-based research on (e)migration attitudes is warranted, a more systematic text analysis of open-ended responses used for theory testing is beyond the scope of this article.

18 Although few respondents also referenced self-interest and personal choice arguments, they were more likely to prefer status quo levels to increased or decreased emigration.