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were really critical here in shaping attitudes toward immigration, we would expect just the opposite of
what we have found: that is, that women would be more opposed to (low-skilled) immigrants from poorer
countries than men, and more supportive than men of (high-skilled) immigrants from richer countries.
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B. Country-Specific Estimations
One possible objection to the analysis of the benchmark model above is that it does not allow that
the effects of individual skill levels on immigration preferences might vary with national factor
endowments (i.e., the local abundance of skilled relative to unskilled labor). The ESS data is extensive
enough that we can address this issue very directly: we can estimate a full series of country-specific
models of immigration preferences and obtain quite precise estimates of the effects of education on
attitudes in each of the 20 individual ESS countries. Table 4 summarizes the results from these
estimations. It reports the marginal effects for years of schooling and educational attainment when the
benchmark model is estimated using responses to the immigration questions in each ESS country.
25
The
countries are again ranked according to levels of GDP per capita to provide for easy comparisons across
countries with different factor endowments.
[Table 4]
If labor market competition is a critical determinant of attitudes toward immigration we should
expect the positive effect of respondent skill levels on support for immigration from poorer countries to
be larger in magnitude in ESS countries with higher levels of GDP per capita (i.e. those with greater skill
abundance), since the standard models suggest that any distributional effects associated with inflows of
low-skilled labor should be larger where low-skilled labor is more scarce. But we should also expect the
negative effect of individual skill levels on support for immigration from richer countries to be smaller in
magnitude in ESS countries with higher levels of GDP per capita, since the distributional impact of high-
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The female preference for immigration from poorer nations may be driven by feelings of compassion for poorer
migrants that are felt more acutely by women than by men. On the other hand, some commentators have suggested
that it may reflect greater demand for (low-skilled) household help. We have experimented with a gender-income
interaction term in hopes of testing this “household help” proposition, finding that, contrary to what it presumably
implies, the gender gap in preferences toward immigrants does not vary significantly across levels of income.
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Full statistical results from all country-specific regressions are available from the authors.
Convention