Immigration has always occurred. Yet, it has not always been at the centre of political debates. This is because immigration has tended to happen according to flows of supply and demand in a natural way. If there was unemployment or famine in one place, and work or population shortage in another, it was only natural that people would relocate. Immigration to the US was only really regulated once the need decreased.
Immigration tends to be politicized when the going gets tough — when unemployment is high, when pandemics hit or when natives are otherwise uncertain about their future or are just angry and bitter. As socio-economic problems arise, so does a fear that immigrants are thoroughly incompatible with the native culture. However, the causal link in this is far from obvious: are socio-economic reasons to oppose immigration linked with cultural fears? Therefore, there is an ongoing debate in the social sciences about whether people oppose immigration primarily for cultural reasons arising out of a fear of losing one’s culture, or for economic reasons arising out of a fear of losing one’s job.
The fields of immigration research are messy precisely because these phenomena are so hard to disentangle. Are people still culturally opposed to immigration in good times and they just lack the trigger to unleash their cultural concerns? When times get tough, are immigrants the scapegoats natives and politicians need? Do people find different reasons at different times to oppose immigration? Or do people rationalize their cultural fears with economic arguments? The existing literature finds evidence for all of these scenarios. The central problem is rather that existing research methods have largely failed to tease out the causal process of immigration preference formation. Thus, while all kinds of explanations for immigration attitudes gain support, they might all be just correlations in which the real reasons are clouded by our inability to separate the various reasons from one another.
Take for example the well-known cases of European capital regions like Paris and Brussels, that have both high shares of immigration and also increasing news of racial segregation and related socio-economic problems. It is not a surprise why capital regions attract immigrants. They offer both job opportunities and a have higher shares of existing immigrants, which creates a more welcoming atmosphere for newcomers.
However, the problem for measurement is that once the feedback loop of a thriving urban economy, job and housing opportunities, and a longer presence of immigrants is in place, it is no longer possible to separate these processes from another. Add to that the de-industrialization that suburban areas are going through due to global competition, the 2008 economic recession, and the restructuring of the labor market, and we have just made it even harder to figure out what is causing what. In short, economic loss and gain and long-term exposure to immigration happen in the same place and survey respondents are likely themselves to have a hard time answering why they think about immigration the way they do. How can researchers then stay on top of this?
Imagine we could have cases in which there is a complete lack of a history of immigration due to low levels of foreigners in the country and that suddenly some areas would be exposed to newcomers while some otherwise comparable regions would not. This is precisely what happened in Finland in 2015 when the unexpected arrival of asylum seekers due to the 2015 refugee crisis caught people by surprise and exposed people to unexpected refugee arrivals. It is interesting to see the effect refugee exposure has on people’s policy preferences and to investigate the driving forces behind people’s support or opposition to them.
When intervening factors are excluded and both people’s exposure to refugees and their policy preferences are measured at the micro-level, we notice something that goes against the common perception: rural people are much more positive about the sudden reception of refugee immigrants than urban respondents. This is especially noteworthy as rural areas are widely thought to be more culturally conservative than urban areas. Upon closer inspection, we see that in rural areas respondents have more interactions with asylum seekers than in urban areas. Interaction not only means seeing them or even befriending them, but also work-based interactions — asylum seekers constitute a much needed and welcome workforce in these regions.
Crucially, this analysis led to another finding. While having meaningful interaction with asylum seekers led to less cultural opposition to immigration, this had nothing to do with how people saw them economically. Vice versa, having economic gains from asylum seekers did not automatically lead to cultural acceptance of them. Economic and cultural fears and gains are two different processes. While cultural fears of immigration are best overcome by increased and meaningful interactions with immigrants, economic opposition to them are best overcome by sending immigrants to places with work shortage rather than unemployment. Currently in Western-Europe, the optimal places for both interaction and for work-placement appear to be rural areas due to less anonymity and an aging population in these areas. This is in contrast with current immigration policies, which tend to cluster immigrants in urban areas.
