Does Information Change Attitudes Towards Immigrants? Representative Evidence from Survey Experiments

Alexis Grigorieff (), Christopher Roth and Diego Ubfal
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Alexis Grigorieff: University of Oxford

No 10419, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study whether providing information about immigrants affects people's attitude towards them. First, we use a large representative cross-country experiment to show that, when people are told the share of immigrants in their country, they become less likely to state that there are too many of them. Then, we conduct two online experiments in the U.S., where we provide half of the participants with five statistics about immigration, before evaluating their attitude towards immigrants with self-reported and behavioral measures. This more comprehensive intervention improves people's attitude towards existing immigrants, although it does not change people's policy preferences regarding immigration. Republicans become more willing to increase legal immigration after receiving the information treatment. Finally, we also measure the same self-reported policy preferences, attitudes, and beliefs in a four-week follow-up, and we show that the treatment effects persist.

Keywords: attitudes towards immigrants; biased beliefs; survey experiment; immigration; policy preferences; persistence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 J15 Z1 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-mig and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Published - published in: Demography, 2020, 57, 1111-1143

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