Drivers of attitudes to immigration: Evidence from a cross-disciplinary meta-analysis

Public opinion about immigration has attracted much scholarly interest and fueled extensive empirical research in recent years. Many different hypotheses have been tested to explain individual and contextual differences in immigration attitudes. Nevertheless, providing a consistent overview of the scientific evidence on the issue remains a challenge. The present article contributes to systematizing recent empirical findings on public attitudes towards immigrants. We conduct a global, multi-disciplinary meta-analysis of over 250 large-sample studies with high external validity from articles published in top-ranked, peer-reviewed journals in the fields of economics, political science, sociology, psychology and migration studies in the past decade (2009-2019). We measure attitudes to immigration on a variety of topics: Immigration and integration policy, including immigrants’ socioeconomic integration or political rights, migration flows, personal feelings about immigrants, as well as the economic, cultural, and social consequences of immigration. Our findings show which individual characteristics matter consistently in explaining attitudes towards immigrants, regardless of the specific group that is studied (i.e. for legal or illegal immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, or immigrants with a distinctive religious or ethnic background), and whether these patterns hold across countries. By providing a comprehensive assessment of the most influential micro and macro-level factors affecting views about immigration, our work will help researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners with the identification of the potential risks of tensions between migrants and citizens.