Would Europeans Accept Immigrants If They Knew Them?

Abstract

Most Europeans demand lower immigration rates. Should politicians follow this demand? The answer to this question depends on whether the anti-immigration attitudes of voters result from negatively biased beliefs. While it has been shown that Europeans perceive the characteristics of immigrants as more negative than they really are, it is unknown whether Europeans would accept immigrants if they held correct beliefs. This paper proposes a method of estimating the immigration attitudes that people with biased beliefs would hold if they were well-informed about the characteristics of immigrants. I apply this method in the context of the European refugee crisis. To do so, I combine data from a vignette study in which 15,000 subjects, representative of the population of 15 European countries, decided on whether to accept or reject hypothetical asylum seekers with data on the characteristics of real asylum seekers. I find that if Europeans had been well informed, majorities in all countries would have rejected most asylum seekers who came to Europe during the refugee crisis. This suggests that anti-asylum seeker attitudes are not mainly driven by biased beliefs.

Keywords: Immigration, Asylum, Refugee, Preference, Misperception, Bias, Belief

JEL Classification: C9, D72, F22, K42, Z1