What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat

TLDR

Public reactions to immigration cost news are thought to vary by immigrant group identity. The study investigates how elite discourse influences public opinion and actions on immigration policy. The experiments show that cost news about immigration elicits stronger white opposition when Latino immigrants are highlighted, with group cues driving anxiety rather than belief changes, and that these effects depend on cue consistency and context, indicating that public responses can be manipulated by anxiety‑inducing group cues.

Abstract

We examine whether and how elite discourse shapes mass opinion and action on immigration policy. One popular but untested suspicion is that reactions to news about the costs of immigration depend upon who the immigrants are. We confirm this suspicion in a nationally representative experiment: news about the costs of immigration boosts white opposition far more when Latino immigrants, rather than European immigrants, are featured. We find these group cues influence opinion and political action by triggering emotions—in particular, anxiety—not simply by changing beliefs about the severity of the immigration problem. A second experiment replicates these findings but also confirms their sensitivity to the stereotypic consistency of group cues and their context. While these results echo recent insights about the power of anxiety, they also suggest the public is susceptible to error and manipulation when group cues trigger anxiety independently of the actual threat posed by the group .