Müller, Tobias and Silvio Hong Tiing Tai

Individual attitudes towards migration: reconciling opposing views
2016

There is disagreement in the literature about the determinants of attitudes toward immigration. Some authors emphasize the role of economic motivations, others argue that attitudes are mostly determined by individual beliefs. This paper reconciles the two positions. We estimate a structural model of individual attitudes towards immigration, accounting for unobserved individual beliefs, and use this model to carry out a decomposition analysis of attitudes in 20 European countries. We find that economic mechanisms are significant determinants of attitudes but that other (non-economic) factors play a more decisive role in the relation between individual education levels and attitudes to immigration.