Are Natives Collar-Blind? Migration Flows and Attitudes Toward Immigration

Abstract This article investigates how regional-level immigration of different origins and educational backgrounds predicts individual policy preferences across Western European countries between 2010 and 2020. Combining data from the European Social Survey and the European Union Labour Force Survey, we examine how changes in net migration affect support for restrictive immigration policies. We find that short-term increases in non-European immigration within a given region are associated with more restrictive migration policy views among natives, regardless of immigrants' education levels. Attitudes toward immigration are also relatively more negatively affected among natives with financial difficulties when immigrants are not tertiary educated, but not when those immigrants have a tertiary education. Our findings suggest that while origin-based heuristics dominate public responses to immigration, natives are not entirely blind to immigrants' educational attainment.