Information about official immigration targets and policy preferences

This paper presents the results of a 6000 respondents pre-registered survey experiment exploring the effects of presenting different types of information about official immigration targets on Canadians' preferences toward immigration policy. Our previously published research (Lawlor and Paquet 2021; Paquet and Lawlor 2022) has shown that Canadian respondents are significantly attuned to messages from the Canadian government (institutional cues) when it comes to outcomes of the immigration system (e.g. relative importance of specific immigration categories) and exhibit surprising patterns of numeracy when it comes to national immigration intakes. This project extends that work, taking as a starting point Canada’s official record immigration targets for 2023-2025, and the country’s plans to increase the intake even further after 2026. We compare the effect of presenting national numerical targets or regional numerical targets, as well as the impact of cueing specific types of immigrants in relation to these targets (e.g., economic immigrants and refugees). Our results confirm that presenting numerical information about official immigration targets leads to an increased propensity to support restrictive policies but that this effect is partially mitigated for respondents who received information about the official proportion of economic immigrants within those targets. In addition to contributing to knowledge about interventions that can combat immigration innumeracy, this study opens the door to a broader research agenda on how institutional cues – which we define as government messages about the immigration program, as well as the explicit and implicit norms associated with the operation of immigration policy – create specific environments for the development of unique types of misperceptions about immigration.