Who is Less Welcome? The Impact of Individuating Cues on Attitudes towards Immigrants

Based on a novel experimental design, the current study examines the impact of economic and cultural characteristics of potential immigrants on anti-immigrant sentiments. We investigate the extent to which individuating cues affect public support for individual immigrants in the USA and the Netherlands through a series of online survey experiments carried out by the YouGov online panel in 2010 and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences Panel in 2011. Our findings demonstrate that individual immigrants elicit different levels of public support for their temporary and permanent immigration applications, and that support depends overwhelmingly on educational and occupational credentials of potential immigrants. Other individual attributes, such as presence of family dependents, country of origin and skin complexion also affect acceptance rates, but to a much lesser extent.