Acceptable and Unacceptable Immigrants: How Opposition to Immigration in Britain is Affected by Migrants' Region of Origin

Abstract

Comparative European research has established that public opposition to immigration is widespread and politically important. However, most existing research has suffered from a serious methodological shortcoming: it employs aggregate measures of attitudes to immigrants, which do not distinguish between different migrant groups. This paper corrects this shortcoming by examining disaggregated British attitudes to migration from seven different regions. I find evidence for a consistent hierarchy of preferences between immigrant groups, with white and culturally more proximate immigrant groups less opposed than non-white and culturally more distinct immigrants. The differences in attitudes to the various migrant groups are very large, calling into question the reliability of analyses which employ aggregate measures of attitudes to immigration. Both total opposition to migration and discrimination between migrant groups decline during the period examined. This is the result of large generational differences in attitudes to immigrants, which are in turn the consequence of cohort differences in education levels, ethnic diversity and, in particular, value orientations. Younger Britons, who are on average less authoritarian and ethnocentric, oppose immigration less and regard different immigrant groups more equally.