When winners win, and losers lose: are altruistic views on immigration always affordable?

Abstract

The existing literature postulates that individual-level attitudes toward immigration are partly determined via the effect of immigration on the labor market. In particular, the labor market competition hypothesis states that natives should oppose immigrants with similar qualifications because they threaten their jobs. Empirical findings, however, partly contradict this expectation. In this paper, we argue that one needs to evaluate immigration attitudes in a broader context since the impact of immigration should be mediated by actual job market competition. In industrialized countries, the arrival of high-skilled immigrants happens against a background in which economic globalization positively affects the demand for high-skilled labor. Thus, the influx of high-skilled immigrants should rarely increase job market competition. The opposite occurs for low-skilled workers, for which labor market insecurity is enhanced by both economic globalization and immigration. We find some support for our argument using micro-level data from 19 European countries.