Fearing what? vignette experiments on anti-immigrant sentiments

Abstract

This study examines the impact of economic and safety threat perceptions on anti-immigrant sentiments. We investigate the extent to which public support for individual immigrants is affected by considerations about economic prospects and criminality of potential immigrants. We utilise survey vignette experiments conducted as part of the Panel Component of the European Social Survey in the Netherlands with a representative sample of the Dutch population. In the vignette experiments, we manipulated economic prospects and criminal background characteristics of immigrants, making them appear more or less likely to be an economic burden for and to pose a safety threat to the host society. Our findings demonstrate that both economic and safety considerations highly influence the public support for individual immigrants. We find that citizens’ views on admissibility of individual immigrants are predominantly shaped by considerations about social welfare costs and criminality of potential immigrants. Our findings further illustrate that safety concerns are yielding to more exclusionist immigration policy preferences than economic threat considerations, especially when those safety threats are measured at the individual level rather than at the collective level.