Immigration in general and the free-movement of persons in particular have been prominent and at times even dominating issue within newsmedia and academic discourses for the past years. Extant literature has sought to explain variation in individuals’ opposition to immigration and has mostly focused on two main forms of natives’ threats when evaluating immigration: economic and cultural sources. The difficulty for existing studies is to disentangle the economic threat immigration poses to a certain individual from the cultural impact of immigration. In our paper, we attempt to separate the economic and the cultural impact immigrants have by making use of a specific particularity of Switzerland as a rather small landlocked country within Europe. It shares long stretches of borders with Germany, France and Italy and thus attracts an unusually high number of cross-border commuters. In contrast to labor migrants from EU/EFTA states, these individuals only come to work in Switzerland but otherwise do not partake in everyday social life within the communities. While economically these commuters pose the same threat as foreigners living in Switzerland, culturally they should not. This gives us a unique opportunity to test whether the labor market competition hypothesis prevails or whether cultural or other factors need to be figured in more closely. Evidence from a survey experiment within the Swiss context, however, indicates that cross-border commuters are viewed much less favorable than resident foreigners (even when controlling for exposure in various ways), weakening both potential explanations.