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National Debates, Local Responses: The Origins of Local Concern about Immigration in Britain and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2011

Daniel J. Hopkins
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Abstract

Theories of inter-group threat hold that local concentrations of immigrants produce resource competition and anti-immigrant attitudes. Variants of these theories are commonly applied to Britain and the United States. Yet the empirical tests have been inconsistent. This paper analyses geo-coded surveys from both countries to identify when residents’ attitudes are influenced by living near immigrant communities. Pew surveys from the United States and the 2005 British Election Study illustrate how local contextual effects hinge on national politics. Contextual effects appear primarily when immigration is a nationally salient issue, which explains why past research has not always found a threat. Seemingly local disputes have national catalysts. The paper also demonstrates how panel data can reduce selection biases that plague research on local contextual effects.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 499 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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49 The notion of salience is invoked in both research on agenda-setting and political psychology, and here refers to the relative attention political elites pay to various issues in their public statements and actions.

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54 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, February 2001 ‘News Interest Survey’ and 2006 ‘Immigration Survey’. Available online at: http://people-press.org/dataarchive/ [accessed 17 February, 2008].

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56 The International Migration Outlook confirms that annual immigrant inflows to the United States declined by 0.8 per cent from 2000 to 2006 (Paris: OECD, 2010), p. 41.

57 Both the 2001 and 2006 Pew surveys are available for download at: http://people-press.org/dataarchive/ [accessed 4 October 2008]. For the 2006 survey, which is our focus here, the AAPOR RR1 response rate was 25.2 per cent.

58 See www.bls.gov [accessed 9 November 2008].

59 USA Today coverage of immigration also correlates highly with coverage on television channels such as Fox News (Pearson’s correlation of 0.73) and CBS News (Pearson’s correlation of 0.69), making it an effective metric of media attention overall.

60 The possibility that these groups might respond to neighbouring immigrants in very different ways led to 196 respondents born outside the United States, 103 US-born Hispanics and 14 US-born Asian Americans being removed. The results are not sensitive to this choice.

61 Currently, the ACS samples many but not all US localities.

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63 For example, 10 per cent of respondents fail to provide their income. In total, 41 per cent of the respondents would be lost to listwise deletion.

64 The median US county had 250,000 residents as of 2000, making these large contextual units. By contrast, the median ZIP code had just 22,300 residents.

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67 Analysing the question about the most important problem facing the community yields substantively similar results despite the reduced variation in response categories.

68 Partisanship is indicated by a seven-category partisan identification question. Income is the respondent’s total annual family income.

69 Appendix available at: www.danhopkins.org.

70 They are similarly robust when conditioning on the respondent’s answer to the question, ‘most recent immigrants do or do not learn English within a reasonable amount of time’, which is related to conceptions of cultural threat.

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81 The respondent’s educational level was measured by sorting 18 qualifications/degrees into 8 ordered categories. The results reported below are robust to including each of the categories as indicator variables as well.

82 Contextual data for low levels of aggregation are not available for respondents living in Scotland.

83 Very similar substantive results appear when we restrict the analysis to fully observed respondents.

84 Table 4 in the online Appendix contains the full fitted model.

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86 Specifically, this figure is created using the two logistic regression models, one fitted to the pre-election data and the second fitted to the post-election data. In each case, we simulate 10,000 sets of coefficients from their estimated joint distribution to account for model-based uncertainty. With these coefficients, we can then simulate the influence of shifting the local context from its 10th percentile to its 90th percentile while holding other variables constant. This procedure yields simulated changes in the probability of naming immigration as the most important problem. The distributions in Figure 5 deviate from the normal distribution both because of the simulation and because they reflect changes in bounded probabilities.

87 Specifically, these additional robustness tests included the percentage with no qualifications, the percentage in the lowest socio-economic group, the percentage of first-time voters, the percentage without children, the percentage in poor health, the percentage working part-time, the percentage of full-time students, the percentage in professional/managerial positions, the percentage in skilled trades, the percentage in agriculture, the percentage in manufacturing, the percentage of households with a lone pensioner, the percentage of households with fewer than one person per room, the percentage of households with no central heating, the percentage of households without a car, and the percentage of the economically active in highly paid professions. The percentage non-white is very highly correlated with the percentage born outside Britain (0.87), meaning that we cannot distinguish empirically between ethnic differences and immigrant/native differences.

88 Given the recent research by Bowyer demonstrating that the presence of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis produces ‘threat’ most consistently, it is worth noting that in these data, both the percentage South Asian and the percentage black are independent, positive predictors of indicating that immigration is Britain’s most important problem. The coefficient for the percentage black is significant (with a t statistic of 2.13) while the coefficient for the percentage South Asian is not (t = 1.35). The same groups do not always drive contextual effects, it seems. See Bowyer, ‘Local Context and Extreme Right Support in England’, and Bowyer, ‘The Determinants of Whites’ Racial Attitudes in England’ for related work.

89 The Economist, How Immigration Played.

90 Van Heerde, Jennifer, ‘Political Communication: Party Advertising in the General Elections’, in Dominic Wring, Jane Green, Roger Mortimore and Simon Atkinson, eds, Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 2005 (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 65–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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92 The measure of competitiveness is a Herfindahl index of vote concentration among Labour, the Conservative Party, and the Labour party.

93 Newspaper content might vary across papers, and especially across papers with different party affiliations. We are thus also interested in whether reading particular newspapers interacts with one’s local context. Deacon et al. provide a listing of newspapers by partisanship: Deacon, David, Wring, Dominic and Golding, Peter, ‘The “Take a Break Campaign?”: National Print Media Reporting of the Election’, in Dominic Wring, Jane Green, Roger Mortimore and Simon Atkinson, eds, Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 2005 (New York: Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar. The average post-election contextual effect for those who read papers supporting the Conservatives is 10.5 percentage points, while for other respondents it is 4.8 percentage points. The p-value for the one-sided test that the effect is smaller among readers of Tory-leaning papers is 0.058. However, we do not see a strong interaction between the respondent’s own party loyalties and the post-election contextual effect. Nor do we see an interaction between the respondent’s education level and the neighbourhood effect. To the extent that the Conservative-leaning papers were more likely to emphasize immigration issues, these findings are yet more evidence for the ‘politicized places’ approach. How one responds to local experiences depends on the frames that connect those experiences to politics.

94 In a similar vein, one might wonder if the effects of living near foreign-born residents are especially pronounced in economically deprived areas, a possibility suggested by theories of realistic group conflict. Yet in fact, separate models detect no strong interaction between the proportion of foreign born and variables including the local percentage unemployed, the percentage in routine jobs, or the percentage with no qualifications. Put differently, respondents are not more concerned about immigration in places where their neighbours are especially economically vulnerable.

95 See Page, Benjamin I. and Shapiro, Robert Y., The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion; and Iyengar and Kinder, News That Matters.

96 See Kinder, ‘Communication and Opinion’; and Mutz, ‘Contextualizing Personal Experience’.

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