Immigration attitudes are largely about ethnocentrism and xenophobia

David Leonhardt has been talking up a new “neopopulism” where there’s more of a bipartisan consensus (in the populist quadrant– socially conservative; fiscally liberal) of our hypothetical political space.  He makes some good points, but I listened to him on both Slate’s Political Gabfest and Derek Thompson’s Plain English last week and he really elided just how much opposition to immigration is not actually economic, but based on racism, xenophobia, white ethnocentrism, whatever you want to call it.  Leonhardt does like to point out that immigration is unpopular with working class voters throughout advanced democracies, but that’s likely because working class voters are more likely to have these race/ethnic-based biases.  Here he is in a recent Morning newsletter:

On many high-profile issues, especially connected to economics, most Americans share a basic set of views. They favor both capitalism and government intervention to address the free market’s shortcomings. Most Americans worry that big business has become too powerful. Most are skeptical of both free trade and high levels of immigration. Most are worried about China’s rise and its increasing assertiveness. 

And his longer article:

Most voters, especially working-class voters, feel differently. The soaring level of immigration during Biden’s presidency, much of it illegal, has become a political liability, and it nearly led to another piece of neopopulist legislation this year. Senate Democrats and Republicans put together a plan to strengthen border security. It was the mirror image of Republicans’ agreeing to support the semiconductor and infrastructure bills: This time, some Democrats abandoned a policy stance that was out of step with public opinion.

The immigration proposal never became law because Trump viewed it as politically helpful to Biden and persuaded congressional Republicans to kill it. But in 2025 or beyond, whether Biden or Trump is president, a version of the bill may come up again. Polls show that the plan’s policies remain very popular.

Yes, immigration is “unpopular.”  Voters are “skeptical.”  If you read me regularly, you know I’m generally a big Leonhardt fan, so it’s really frustrating to see how much he ignores how much immigration sentiment is driven by bigotry and bias. 

I’ve been doing a lot with 2020 and 2022 American National Election Study data recently for my abortion research, so it was really easy to just throw in some regressions with immigration.  Check out this chart of a regression model on how much the federal government should spend to “tighten border security.”  This model, whites only, controls for all the basic demographics along with partisanship and political ideology. All the variables are scaled 0-1, so you can see that whiteethno2 (feeling thermometer towards whites minus feeling thermometer average towards Blacks/Asians/Hispanics) is hugely predictive of border security attitudes.  

I find similar results in 2022.  Also, using attitudes towards Muslims and measures of “racial resentment” are likewise hugely predictive of immigration policy attitudes when controlling for partisanship and ideology.  Oh, yeah, and being low income (and presumably more directly economically threatened by immigration), too.  

I also did a bit of a literature search and came across this fantastic article by Steven V. Miller (pretty clear why he uses the middle initial): “Economic anxiety or ethnocentrism? An evaluation of attitudes toward immigration in the U.S. from 1992 to 2017”

Does “economic anxiety” explain attitudes toward immigration or can we better understand attitudes toward immigration as an outcome of ethnocentrism? This is a long-standing empirical debate in immigration opinion research and a debate that has struggled to distinguish the relative effects. I help settle this debate with a battery of analyses on attitudes toward immigration across the American National Election Studies and Voter Study Group data, spanning analyses on immigration opinion for white Americans from 1992 to 2017 with economic data at levels as granular as the state, county, core-based statistical area (CBSA), and the ZIP code. My analyses are unequivocal that ethnocentrism is reliably the largest and most precise predictor of attitudes toward immigration. Further analyses and simulations from models most consistent with the economic anxiety argument show that a standard deviation increase in ethnocentrism is still a greater or equal magnitude effect than all economic anxiety proxies combined. I close with implications for immigration opinion research.

It’s impressively thorough research that considers all sorts of different of measures of “economic anxiety.”  Here’s a key chart comparing ethnocentrism (the feeling thermometer measure) against a variety of indicators of economic anxiety.  So, yeah, it absolutely bias against immigrants that’s driving so much of this.

Just to make things really clear, I ran a model of immigration attitudes for only college-educated, upper income, white Republicans.  Realistically, just not a ton of economic anxiety going on in this group.  And, of course, racial outgroup attitudes were hugely significant.

This is not to say “open borders!”  And, in a democracy we cannot just ignore the attitudes of our fellow citizens, whatever the ultimate source.  But, damnit, we can be honest about where these attitudes are actually coming from for the majority of conservatives.