Anti-immigrant bias among education professionals: Experimental evidence from primary, secondary, and vocational schools in the Community of Madrid

Education is a key public service for migrant integration processes. While much is known about attitudes towards migrants among the general public, fewer studies assess these attitudes among education professionals (teachers, orientation service staff, social educators and administrative staff), in spite of the fundamental role they play in migrant integration through education. This paper presents the results of a web-survey embedded conjoint experiment administered within the AMIF AccessIn project in which we aimed at identifying latent attitudes towards students of migrant origin in public and public-private (primary, secondary and vocational) schools in the Community of Madrid. Our findings demonstrate that, even after accounting for student’s performance at school and other relevant factors, education professionals suffer from a small but significant anti-immigrant bias in their assessment of future performance, deservingness of scholarships, and suitability of continuing their education to post-obligatory levels, discriminating students of migrant origin in comparison to the native ones. These findings suggest that diversity/anti-discrimination trainings should play a more substantive role in the education professionals’ curricula.