In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Sienna Nordquist, covers the new article by Andreas Wimmer, Bart Bonikowski, Charles Crabtree, Zheng Fu, Matt Golder, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, “Geo-Political Rivalry and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: A Conjoint Experiment in 22 Countries”.
Between trade wars, interstate wars, and civil conflicts, geopolitics in the world is heating up. Isolationism—or the desire for a country to remain on its own and disengage from international cooperation—is becoming more popular in many corners of the world. It is also changing how governments and people view international relations and their country’s role in the world. But does that affect how individuals perceive immigration? In a recent APSR article, Wimmer and his coauthors answer the question through survey experiments they conducted in 22 diverse countries worldwide. They find that immigrants from rival countries are less desirable, even less appealing than immigrants who are racially or culturally more different but from an allied country. The onset of the War in Ukraine showed this clearly: Russian immigrants became massively less popular among citizens of Western countries, while they were increasingly willing to admit Ukrainian immigrants.
When individuals think about immigration and which immigrants they do or do not want to let into their countries, characteristics like race, education, or age tend to predominate. Less often considered, but still important, is how the foreign policy relationship between an immigrant’s country of origin and the host state affects hostility or friendliness towards immigrants. For example, anti-Japan sentiment became weaponized in the US after the Pearl Harbor attack during World War II as Japanese immigrants and their children were seen as a threat to America’s security. More recently, Muslims have been targeted in the aftermath of 9/11. On the other hand, welcoming refugees from rival countries can itself be aligned with a government’s strategic interests, such as when Western countries welcomed political asylum seekers from Soviet satellite states during the Cold War. Teasing out how individuals and potential host governments view immigrants based on their country of origin is therefore not straightforward.
The authors creatively tackle the challenge of understanding how country of origin influences attitudes towards immigrants. They designed a unique survey experiment which asked survey participants to choose between two candidates for permanent residency. The respondents
made this choice multiple times, with the characteristics of the applicant—like their gender, age, job, and, crucially, country of origin—changing between rounds. This approach helps the researchers determine which features of immigrants matter more than others in shaping how desirable they are perceived to be. The survey was implemented in 22 states, including the USA, several European countries, Brazil, Peru, Turkey, India, the Philippines, and South Africa, amongst others. In a stroke of luck for their research (but not the world), the survey was implemented a couple of days before and after Russia attacked Ukraine. This allowed them to test how the intensification of a conflict to the level of open war influenced perceptions of Ukrainian and Russian immigrants around the world. When they examine the survey data day-by-day, they find that support for accepting Ukrainian applicants and rejecting Russian applicants rose every day after Russia invaded mainland Ukraine on February 22, 2024. At the same time, the survey results on the popularity of Japanese and the unpopularity of Chinese immigrants stayed the same, suggesting that the public responds to the decisions of a rival state (here, Russia) to begin new conflicts and increases its acceptance of citizens of the allied state (Ukraine).
Beyond the Russia-Ukraine case, the authors discover that being from a rival country makes it less likely and being from a non-rival country makes it more likely for survey respondents to select the given applicant for permanent residency. Not only that, but they determine that the rival/ally nature of an applicant’s origin country matters more than gender, how culturally or racially different the applicant is, and for how long the immigrant has lived in the host country. They also ran a second survey to confirm that residents in the surveyed countries do indeed consider the countries of origins to be rivals, non-rivals, and culturally/racially similar or different. The findings of the second survey echoed their expectations, besides a few exceptions like South Africans not perceiving China as more of a foreign policy threat than Japan.
“In short, the research findings lend important insight into how a country’s geopolitical stances affect immigration preferences and attitudes.”In addition to general tendencies to support or oppose potential immigrants from rival and non-rival countries of origin, Wimmer and his coauthors consider how the individual characteristics of the survey takers themselves influence their immigration attitudes. Their results indicate that the preferences for immigrants from allied countries and the discrimination against immigrants from rival countries are stronger for individuals who belong to the majority population and for individuals who believe in the superiority of their own country vis-à-vis all others. In other words, the stronger the national identification of individuals, the more they weigh geopolitical alliances when deciding which immigrants should be allowed into their country.
The authors also rule out some alternative explanations. For example, they consider that survey respondents may be reacting to the autocratic nature of the rival states (such as Russia or China), not the mere fact they are rivals. However, they find democracy scores do not affect preference for immigrants from different countries. This suggests it truly is the geopolitical relationships with origin countries that drive preferences for certain immigrants over others. Other factors may matter as well—for example, if the potential immigrant is from a Muslim or non-Muslim majority country, which the authors did not test. In short, the research findings lend important insight into how a country’s geopolitical stances affect immigration preferences and attitudes. Amidst a world in flux of shifting alliances and international coalitions, whether and how the public changes its views on other nationalities around the world will be of central value to discussions of immigration, cooperation, and peace.
- Sienna Nordquist is a 3rd year PhD Student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University, Italy. She is also a visiting researcher at the WZB’s Transformations of Democracy Unit in Berlin, Germany. Originally from the US, Sienna was a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar at Emory University, received her Master’s degree from the LSE’s European Institute, and has been a Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
- WIMMER, ANDREAS et al. 2024.“Geo-Political Rivalry and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: A Conjoint Experiment in 22 Countries.” American Political Science Review, 1–18.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.