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What do trade agreements have to do with migration policy?
Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) aim to facilitate trade between two or more countries by doing things such as cutting tariffs or facilitating investment, but new research from the University of Geneva shows that that more than 70%...
Introduction
Attitudes to immigration are becoming part of a new political cleavage in many countries (Kriesi et al., 2012). While a growing share of foreign-born residents is viewed positively by those stressing the benefits of immigration, others regard these demographic changes with suspicion. Especially in the aftermath of the so-called “migration crisis”, governments of Western as well as Central and Eastern European countries, though historically on the sending side of immigration, have faced public resentment against immigrants among their domestic population.
Against this backdrop, opposition to immigration has gained a lot of attention from social scientists. While the majority of studies have focused on individual drivers of attitudes to immigration (see Dražanová et al., 2022 for a meta-analysis), the scientific literature has shown that contextual drivers, and in particular, the real or perceived size of immigration can have a significant influence on public opinion (see for instance Alesina et al., 2018). At the same time, several recent studies have documented the role played by immigrants’ characteristics as potential drivers of attitudes towards migration in Europe (Markaki and Longhi, 2013; Bridges and Mateut, 2014; Weber, 2015; Hale Williams and Chasapopoulos, 2019). This work contributes to this literature by exploring the link between the size and composition of international migration flows on individuals´ attitudes towards immigration in European regions and deepening our understanding of the macro-level drivers of attitudes to migration in European countries. It provides original and valuable insight into how the regional temporal changes of foreign-born immigrants predict attitudes towards immigration. More specifically, it has been for instance documented that the public response to the arrival of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees has been very different, as Europeans in most countries appear to be much more welcoming of the latter (see for example Dražanová and Geddes, 2022). Our study helps unpack some of the possible origin, educational and gender-based drivers behind these differences.
Previous empirical research has examined the impact of regional factors on attitudes towards immigrants in Europe, and in particular how the size of immigration and the characteristics of immigrants predict attitudes to immigration. In this regard, our paper is similar to Markaki and Longhi (2013) and Hale Williams and Chasapopoulos (2019). However, we differentiate ourselves from these studies in several ways. While these works focus on the effect of between-region variations in the share of foreign-born immigrants, we primarily consider how short-term, within-region variations predict attitudes to immigration. Traditionally, the share of the foreign-born population residing in a territory is usually the product of long-term changes and migration history, whose effects can be hard to disentangle from other macro-level, contextual drivers of attitudes to immigration such as economic conditions, cultural and religious beliefs, as well as national or regional policies. In this regard, we believe the predictive power of immigration on public opinion is better identified by focusing on migration pressure, or how natives’ attitudes towards immigration change with the recent arrival of foreign-born immigrants. In particular, we focus our attention on within-region, short-term temporal variations in the regional share of foreign-born immigrants.