Too many immigrants: What shapes perceptions and attitudes towards immigrants in England and Wales?

This paper investigates the link between natives’ residential context, perception of immigration levels and attitudes towards immigrants. We use British Election Study to extract individual level measures for 17,000 respondents in England and Wales and match them with contextual characteristics at the level of Westminster constituency. The paper focuses on three questions: (1) is perception of demographic changes affected by actual growth of the immigrant population? (2) if local context is associated with natives’ attitudes towards immigrants, which immigrant groups are most salient? (3) are base levels and changes in immigrant population affecting anti-immigration attitudes in the same way? We find that local context predicts both perception and attitudes, although individual characteristics seem to play a bigger role. Natives seem to be more sensitive to immigrant groups defined by ethnic criteria, rather than skills or religion. Natives are sensitive to changes of immigrant population but base levels of immigrant population are associated with less frequent reporting of high immigration levels. Similarly, natives are more hostile towards immigrants if they reside in areas where the immigrant population grew rapidly, but higher base levels of immigrant population mitigate this response.