Written by Noah Carl.
It is common to hear that opposition to mass migration is somehow irrational.
A Guardian journalist refers to “the irrational fear of migrants”. A Vox journalist refers to “the irrational fear of outsiders”. A Guardian reader claims that “the fear of immigration is largely irrational and not subject to facts or figures.” A report for the Human Rights Research Centre refers to the “irrational fear that white people will eventually become outnumbered or replaced”. The writer Suketu Mehta claims that Trump voters in 2016 were “motivated by an utterly irrational fear and hatred of immigrants”. Another writer claims that “the fear of immigrants coming into our country is a phobia, that is, an irrational fear”.
This view—of the slow-witted, dunderheaded restrictionist—is summed up in the following viral tweet:
The poster claims that opposing immigration is a stance “that we cannot indulge as valid in any area of politics”. It is “just bigotry”, he says.
Of course, we can actually test this hypothesis. If opposition to mass migration were driven by nothing more than prejudice against foreigners, you would expect opponents to support something like a blanket ban. In other words, you’d expect them to be more or less indifferent between various categories of migrants. You certainly wouldn’t expect much correspondence between their preferences for and against different groups and the impact of those groups on the host country. Is this what we find in the data?