The usual suspects?: attitudes towards immigration during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 has intensified public apprehension about foreigners. In this article, we examine two questions related to public opinion on immigration. First, we assess the importance of cultural and economic factors in studying why individuals support or oppose immigration. Second, we examine the role of public health concerns in shaping attitudes towards open borders by priming the vaccination status of immigrants and the number of COVID-19 cases in their home countries. Using a conjoint analysis based on the data provided by nearly 1,700 respondents in South Korea, we find empirical support for both the existing explanations and public health concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration policy
• public opinion
• South Korea
• COVID-19
• conjoint experiment

Acknowledgments

This research was approved by Korea University’s Institutional Review Board (Approval Number: KUIRB-2021-0080-01). We acknowledge generous funding from the National Research Foundation of Korea under the 2020 Rapid Call for International Joint Research Against the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic (Grant No. 2020K2A9A1A01095232). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Research Foundation of Korea. Sung Eun Kim acknowledges funding from the Korea University Research Grant (Grant No. K2107641).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See Chung and Woo (2015) for the role of national pride among South Korean citizens’ perceptions of their neighbouring countries (e.g., China) as a potential ally.

2. See Chung and Yi (2021) for details about South Korea’s strategies against COVID-19.

3. However, there is little empirical evidence that migrants pose as a net burden on public finances (Card, 2009; Peri, 2012, 2013).

4. Korean Ministry of Justice and Korean Statistical Information Service. https://kosis.kr/statHtml/statHtml.do?orgId=111&tblId=DT_1B040A5A&conn_path=I2 (Accessed on 02 March, 2022).

5. OECD (2022), Fertility rates (indicator). https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm (Accessed on 02 March 2022).

6. We present examples of immigrant profiles and exact questionnaires (in Korean) in Figures A1 and A2 of the appendix.

7. Based on the regional distribution of population, regions are grouped into six categories as follows: (1) Seoul; (2) Incheon, Gyeonggi Province, and Gangwon Province; (3) Daejeon, North Chungcheong Province, and South Chungcheong Province; (4) North Jeolla Province, South Jeolla Province, and Jeju Province; (5) North Gyeongsang Province; and (6) South Gyeongsang Province.

8. We also use an alternative outcome variable based on responses to the question on whether each immigrant group should be permitted to enter without quarantine or after 14 days of quarantine, or should not be permitted to enter South Korea. An examination of 16,870 individual responses to this question (1,687 responses $\times$ 10 immigrant profiles) shows that respondents selected to admit an immigrant without quarantine in 5.8% of cases and after 14 days of quarantine in 74.9% of cases. Respondents chose not to admit an immigrant in 19.3% of cases. We present the effects of immigrant attributes on admission decisions based on the AMCE estimates (Figure A3) and the multinomial logistic regression (Figure A4) in the appendix. The results show that an immigrant’s vaccination status and COVID-19 cases in the origin country are the key predictors of one’s support for an immigrant’s entry into South Korea.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [2020K2A9A1A01095232].

Notes on contributors

Sung Eun Kim

Sung Eun Kim is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University. She specialises in international political economy with a focus on trade politics and protectionism.

Adrian J. Shin

Adrian J. Shin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specialises in the political economy of international migration and inequality.

Yujeong Yang

Yujeong Yang is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research interests include Comparative and International Policy Economy with a regional focus on China.