(I am sorry for my late submission, I noticed today that I even missed the extended deadline, but I would be very grateful if you would consider my paper for inclusion in your conference)

The relationship between public opinion and immigration policy remains unclear. Despite increasing supranational constraints, government responsiveness is apparent at the national level, though previous research on this subject has often failed to account for seasonality or the ways in which preferences interact with salience.

To investigate the drivers of these national variations, I turn to the specific case of asylum seekers in EU countries. As the number of displaced people continues to rise globally, this form of immigration is likely to be a contentious area of policymaking for years to come. Using asylum data together with preference and salience surveys, I apply time series methods to compare the opinion-policy link in the UK and Germany from 2002 to the present. Initial results show signs of responsiveness in both countries, largely positive in Germany and negative in the UK, with each indicating something of a thermostatic relationship between opinion and policy. By comparing the two countries and disaggregating the data according to group characteristics, I also examine the role of specific public preferences, institutional variations, and interest groups as possible explanatory factors for these different outcomes.