13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Ilona Erzsebet Lahdelma
Discussant/s:
Moritz Marbach
Meeting Room J

Denis Cohen, Sergi Pardos-Prado
Regional labor markets and the politics of resentment

Samuel Schmid
Open borders versus inclusive membership? Explaining the association between immigration and citizenship regimes

Eman Abboud
The Exit Option: an analysis of how ethnopolitical exclusion motivates emigration desires from sub-Saharan Africa

Théoda Woeffray
Implementation Leeway in the Dublin System: How Efficiency Considerations Influence Dublin Procedures in Switzerland

Ilona Lahdelma, Spyros Kosmidis
Does learning about the economic benefits of immigration update people's policy preferences?
Does learning about the economic benefits of immigration update people's policy preferences?
Ilona Lahdelma 1, Spyros Kosmidis 2
1 Juan March Institute, Carlos III
2 University of Oxford

The labor market hypothesis has been recently increasingly dismissed as an explanation for immigration preferences, noting that people oppose immigration more based on cultural reasons than economic ones. However, an increasing body of literature is showing that immigration is in many ways benifitial for the economies of the receiving communities. Is the economic argument more salient if the respondents are aware of these positive externalities of immigration? We test this by administering a survey experiment in the UK, where respondents are primed to various degrees of the positive economic consequences of granting work permits to asylum seekers. Results show that informing respondents about asylum seekers taking jobs that are unwanted by the locals increases support for granting asylum seekers work permits. This effect is more pronounced among respondents who voted "Leave" in the EU referendum, indicating that the narrative of the economic benefits also works for people who are otherwise opposed to immigration.