Tax Evasion and Attitudes Towards Immigration: An Experimental Analysis

This paper investigates the impact of natives’ attitudes towards immigration on their support for redistribution by relying on data from a tax compliance experiment. The analysis explores two effects which may contribute to anti-immigration attitudes: the ethic anxiety and the ethnic deservingness effects. The ethnic anxiety effect is pure hostility and fear towards all immigrants as a group. The ethnic deservingness effect is a perception of immigrants as inherently less deserving of state benefits than natives. Tax laboratory experiments conducted in the North and South of Italy show that higher ethnic anxiety and ethnic deservingness significantly and positively affect individual evasion choices. More interestingly, the findings reveal that the ethnic deservingness effect is not as relevant as the tax-compliance deservingness effect, that is the perception of tax evaders as less deserving of tax-funded benefits than taxpayers and unemployed, regardless of their being immigrants or natives. This paper concludes that negative attitudes towards tax evaders have a stronger impact on natives’ redistribution support than negative attitudes towards immigration. This provides novel implications for deservingness criteria and immigration policies.