Redirecting Xenophobia: How New Migration Flows Improve Intergroup Relations in Immigrant Destinations

Abstract

Worldwide, cases of repeat migration from multiple origins are increasingly common. How then should we expect host citizens’ attitudes about one migrant group to change when another migrant group enters the scene? Conventional approaches expect new migration to have negative effects, intensifying discrimination against immigrants as their numbers grow. Instead, the three papers of this dissertation argue that public opinion about immigrants is reference frame dependent, meaning that evaluations about one group are made relative to other salient groups with which a person is familiar. This implies that a new group’s arrival can lead local citizens to re-evaluate their opinions about other already present immigrant groups, with new groups providing contrast and redirecting negative attention formerly given to others. As a result, a new migrant group's arrival can decrease prejudice towards other immigrant groups living in an area. Using data from Chile, Brazil, fifteen European nations and the United States, I demonstrate that many migrant groups experience improvements in the way host citizens view them in the wake of a new migrant group's arrival. As a whole, my findings suggest that attitudes about specific immigrant groups are strongly influenced by the salience of other groups in a society, and demonstrates that prejudice can decline more quickly and more widely than many existing theories would presume. Chapter 1 introduces this theory and evaluates whether a massive influx of Venezuelan migrants into Chile starting in late 2017 changed how Chileans viewed Peruvian immigrants. To test the argument, I pair unique national panel survey data that tracks Chileans’ attitudes towards specific immigrant groups with an original measure of immigrant group salience based on Google searches and an original survey experiment. I find that Chileans’ attitudes towards Peruvian migrants improved as Venezuelans’ salience increased in the country. The changes I observe over just four years amount to a substantial reduction in immigrant-directed prejudice which most other studies only observe occurring over decades. Chapter 2 probes whether attitudes towards existing immigrants still improve even when they may be less favorably contrasted with new arrivals on racial or cultural grounds. Using field observations and a face-to-face conjoint experiment, I show that that Brazilian citizens living in the migration frontline state of Roraima exhibit a marked preference for Haitian migrants, even though these migrants are darker-skinned and more culturally distinct than newer immigrants from Venezuela. Comparisons with eighteen other Brazilian cities reveals that this pattern replicates in areas with similar migration patterns to Roraima’s. These results demonstrate the power of salient new immigrant groups to attract public and political attention, leading to improved host relations even with immigrant outgroups that might otherwise be disfavored. In Chapter 3, I develop a new strategy for analyzing conjoint experiments that uncovers how subtle variation in immigrant group salience changes citizens’ evaluations of immigrants. I apply this technique to two published surveys about immigration preferences that collectively sampled 38,000 respondents in sixteen countries. Taking advantage of the randomized ordering of conjoint tasks, I show that that viewing disliked groups like Russians and Muslims has a positive effect on appraisals of preferred immigrant groups like Christians and Ukrainians. I conclude that attitudes about specific migrant groups are not just an outgrowth of their own traits, but that these attitudes are also shaped by the presence of other groups in the social environment.