‘Let the Right Ones In’: Immigration Preferences in Britain

In the current post-war ‘Age of Migration’ scholars from a range of disciplines have attempted to understand anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. While these studies provide fairly clear indications of the types of threat that motivate hostility to immigrants and immigration, there is still limited research about the degree of variation that exists towards different types of migrants and their attributes. Drawing on rich, pertinent and original survey data collected in October 2017, this paper seeks to provide a nuanced analysis of the drivers of immigration attitudes in Britain. In particular, we employ a conjoint experiment to identify the type of immigrants who are supported for admission by the general public by asking a representative sample of British citizens to rank and choose between different profiles, with varied and randomised immigrant attributes. This innovative approach allows us to compare the desirability of key attributes on a single scale, for the first time in Britain, and hence, disentangle and identify the explanatory power of competing hypotheses on the drivers of public attitudes more broadly. Findings demonstrate that the skills that immigrants possess is the single biggest driver of attitudes; high-skilled immigrants are six-times more likely to be supported for admission. The reason for migrating is the second biggest influence, with forcibly displaced people preferred over economic migrants. The marital status of immigrants is also statistically significant, with single, younger people -perhaps surprisingly- preferred over older applicants who are married with children. The gender or the origin (from or outside the EU) of immigrants, controlling for the other attributes, does not influence attitudes, contrary to public representations during the EU Referendum. The paper analyses the relative influence of these variables and explores potential factors that shape them, as well as their implications for policy-making in the UK and beyond.