Replication data for: Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact

What explains variation in individuals’ opposition to immigration? The extant literature has focused on two main forms of threat as underlying sources of opposition: economic and cultural. While scholars have consistently shown cultural concerns to be strong predictors of opposition to immigration, findings regarding the labor market competition hypothesis are highly contested. To help understand these divergent results, we distinguish between the prevalence and conditional impact of determinants of attitudes on immigration. Leveraging a targeted sampling strategy of high-technology counties, we conduct an in-depth study of Americans’ attitudes towards H-1B visas. The plurality of these visas are occupied by Indian immigrants, who are highly skilled but ethnically and culturally distinct, enabling us to measure a specific set of skills (high-technology) that are threatened by a particular type of immigrant (H-1B visa holders). Unlike recent aggregate studies, our targeted approach finds that the conditional impact of the relationship in the high-technology sector between economic threat and immigration policy attitudes is sizeable, a result confirmed by a range of robustness checks. However, because most people do not face labor market competition from immigrants in their particular economic sector, the influence of economic threat on attitudes is not prevalent, and therefore is generally not detected in aggregate analyses. The findings suggest that economic threat is more relevant when analyzing low-salience policy debates dominated by interest groups, yet is a limited factor in explaining general anti-immigration attitudes on high-salience issues of concern to the broader public.何因素能够解释个体反移民态度的异质性？现有相关文献主要将两类威胁视为反移民态度的核心潜在来源：经济威胁与文化威胁。尽管学者们一致证实文化担忧是反移民态度的强预测因子，但有关劳动力市场竞争假说的研究结论却存在极大争议。为厘清这些相互矛盾的研究结论，我们区分了移民态度决定因素的普遍性效应与条件性影响。我们采用针对高科技县的靶向抽样策略，针对美国人对H-1B签证（H-1B Visa）的态度开展了深入研究。该类签证的绝大多数持有者为印度移民，他们技能精湛却在族裔与文化层面具有鲜明独特性，这使得我们能够衡量特定技能群体（高科技从业者）所面临的来自特定移民群体（H-1B签证持有者）的威胁。与近期的总体研究不同，我们的靶向研究发现，高科技部门内经济威胁与移民政策态度之间的条件性影响相当显著，这一结论通过一系列稳健性检验得到了验证。然而，由于多数民众并未在自身所属的经济领域面临来自移民的劳动力市场竞争，经济威胁对个体态度的影响并不具备普遍性，因此在总体分析中通常难以被观测到。研究结果表明，经济威胁在分析由利益集团主导的低关注度政策辩论时更具解释力，但在解释广大公众共同关注的高关注度议题下的一般性反移民态度时，其作用则较为有限。