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income, employment, and unemployment are actually very small (see Bhagwati 2000, 2002; Friedberg
and Hunt 1995). Since the most sophisticated economic models are quite equivocal about whether
immigrants will have an adverse impact on the wages or employment opportunities of local workers,
perhaps these latter results should not be so surprising. But this does raise a big question about how
exactly we should interpret the very clear relationship between the education or skill levels among
individuals and their views about immigration. One established line of scholarship would regard this
pattern not as a reflection of labor market dynamics, but instead as confirmation that higher levels of
education lead to greater ethnic and racial tolerance among individuals and more cosmopolitan outlooks
(e.g., Espenshade and Calhoun 1993; Citrin et al. 1997; McLaren 2001). Viewed in this light, immigration
is an issue that raises fundamental questions about values and identities among individuals, debates over
immigration are shaped less by labor market competition than by cultural conflict, and the division
between more and less-educated natives is primarily a cultural or ideological distinction.
Which of these interpretations is more correct? Is the main motivator for opposition to
immigration the threat of economic competition, felt most acutely among the less educated? Or is it a
deeper animosity toward foreigners and foreign cultures, felt least strongly among the more educated?
The answer to this question is critical to our understanding of the politics of immigration and the
treatment of ethnic minorities. It is crucial, too, for policymakers and others who support immigration and
worry about the growth of extremist, often violent, anti-immigrant movements. If anti-immigration
sentiments are based primarily upon economic calculations, there are some very direct ways in which
policymakers might address them: for instance, by targeting forms of adjustment assistance and job
creation programs toward the communities or industries in which the economic impact is felt most
heavily. If opposition to immigration is motivated by more deep-seated cultural factors, on the other hand,
these types of adjustment assistance are unlikely to be effective and it is much more difficult to imagine
simple, short-run measures that would mitigate the political tensions.
We examine new data on attitudes toward immigration available from the 2003 European Social
Survey (ESS). Unlike other sources of survey data on attitudes toward immigrants, the 2003 ESS provides
Convention