How pro-immigration policies can win public support in an era of populism

Immigration is one of the most divisive issues in modern politics across the globe, but new research suggests that support for expanding legal immigration may not be as intractable as it seems.

Morris Levy, associate professor of political science at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, co-authored a sweeping study, analyzed in a working paper posted to SSRN that surveyed more than 20,000 adults across nine liberal democracies in North America and Europe.

The study used a series of survey experiments to explore how people respond to different types of immigration policies. The central question: Can the design of immigration policy shift public opinion — even among those who tend to oppose immigration in general?

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

The research found that even modest requirements appended to immigration policies — such as requiring newcomers to find employment or demonstrate basic language proficiency — can dramatically increase support for expanding immigration. The effects held across countries, political ideologies, and even in the face of counterarguments.

Key findings:

• Support increases significantly when immigration policies include basic integration requirements, like employment, language skills or background checks — especially among conservatives, where support rose by as much as 15 percentage points in some cases and opposition cratered.
• Specific policy requirements — like stipulating that immigrants must work or learn the language — were more persuasive than broadly positive statements about how legal immigrants, as a group, tend to integrate.
• Support held strong even when the immigrants were from stigmatized regions, such as the Middle East — as long as the policies included basic integration requirements.
• Even when counterarguments were introduced, such as concerns about cultural assimilation or economic burden, support remained high if integration requirements were included, either about immigrants’ employment or basic language proficiency.

USC Dornsife News spoke with Levy to understand what these findings reveal about immigration opinion today and what they could mean for the future of policy design.

Why is it important to understand how to bridge the political divide over immigration?

Public frustration with illegal immigration and permissive, poorly administered asylum policies abounds in Europe and North America. Right-wing populists have capitalized on this discontent to vault from the margins to the forefront of electoral politics, scaring establishment parties out of their wits. Stalwart supporters of immigration are now on the defensive, eager to shed the image of out-of-touch “globalists” by tightening asylum policy, getting tough on the border and slashing legal immigration levels.

But drastic cuts to immigration would be a disaster for these countries. Western societies are aging rapidly and face heightened global economic competition. Immigration spurs productivity and innovation, ensures prosperity and viable social safety nets, and — at least in the U.S. and Canada — embodies our heritage as lands of opportunity for those willing to work hard and adopt our core values.

Responsible leaders must find ways to tailor and communicate about immigration policies that can bring these benefits without alienating voters who worry that immigration is out of control, burdensome or harmful to social cohesion. That is a hard task!

Your research tested how people respond to specific immigration policy details. What kinds of requirements made the biggest difference?

The requirements that matter most across Canada, the U.S. and the seven Western European countries in our study are the most basic types of integration: getting a job and learning the language. These are things that most immigrants, in fact, already do — so structuring policies that encourage or mandate them would be feasible while preserving large-scale admissions.

It’s worth noting that while people especially support admitting more immigrants with advanced degrees and STEM backgrounds, the policies we tested included no requirements that prospective immigrants be “highly skilled” — and still won broad support.

One of your most striking findings was that people’s opinions shifted even when their overall attitudes toward immigrants didn’t. Why do you think that is?

There are often gaps in public opinion between abstract or general feelings about something and specific preferences about policies. Take, for example, political scientists’ common depiction of Americans as “philosophically conservative and operationally liberal.” What this means is that many people say they want smaller government but also support the very social programs and regulations that comprise most of the government’s activities and expenditures.

This is because Americans’ small-government ethos co-exists with support for the specific goals those government activities further — assisting the elderly and infirm, correcting market failures, promoting equal opportunity and so on.

Similarly, many people say they would like less immigration, but they also endorse many of the economic and humanitarian goals that specific immigration policies seek to achieve.  In earlier work, we found that while large portions of the American public support reducing legal immigration levels, far smaller percentages support cuts to the number of immigrants admitted on the basis of family ties to U.S. citizens, employment or humanitarian need. These categories make up well over 90% of the green cards issued by the U.S. government.

What we found in this study is that although people would prefer not to increase immigration in general, they can accept — or even support — policies that do so if they come with provisions that suggest immigrants will be productive and integral members of society.

Many political messages try to win over the public by highlighting immigrants’ positive contributions. But your study found that wasn’t nearly as persuasive as policy requirements. What does that tell us?

One thing it tells us is that many people do not automatically connect general information about immigrants with their views on specific immigration policies. For example, someone may believe immigration has brought benefits in the past but worry that an increase in new immigration would hinder assimilation or let in a different kind of person — someone perceived to bring more risks and offer fewer benefits.

Many people also have fairly developed attitudes about immigration, in general, that have taken shape over long periods and are thus hard to change. But a new policy proposal is closer to a blank slate, and people can learn about its content and make up their minds without preconceived notions or so much emotional baggage.

There may be ways to bolster support by highlighting the contributions of immigrants as a group, but the evidence is mixed at best, and such claims are inevitably met with negative counterarguments in public debate. The more direct route we examine is to propose policies with stipulations and requirements that directly address common concerns about integration.

Did you see differences in how liberals and conservatives responded to these policy details?

Yes — enormous ones. While the policies we tested made both liberals and conservatives more supportive of immigration, the effects were significantly greater among conservatives, despite their much stronger baseline opposition to immigration in general.

In other words, these policies didn’t just make liberals who already supported immigration more supportive — the biggest shift came from reducing opposition among people who aren’t predisposed to view immigration positively.

How durable do you think this support is? Does a brief policy description change minds for the long term — or just in the moment?

From these studies, we can’t know whether people will remember what they hear, how often they must be reminded or how easily opponents could undermine support — though the effects were quite robust even in the face of strong counterarguments.

What the findings do show is that most people are not implacably opposed to policies that would increase immigration. They are persuadable — especially when given clear, specific information about what a policy entails. And because that kind of policy information can be communicated consistently, it offers a viable path for building and reinforcing public support over time.

The bigger question is whether political leaders have the credibility to lead on this issue or whether voters will believe that policy requirements are hollow and won’t actually be implemented. For decades, establishment parties have squandered credibility on immigration by maligning or ignoring public discontent, failing to enforce existing laws and promoting unpopular multiculturalism policies that, in their more extreme forms, reject assimilation and conflict with pervasively held public attachments to nationalism and individualism.

In the U.S., conservatives continue to view the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act as a cautionary tale. That law granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, but the promised “grand bargain” never fully materialized, as successive administrations failed to enforce provisions meant to curb future illegal immigration. That skepticism weighed heavily on later efforts at “comprehensive immigration reform” during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

To effectively promote the kinds of policies we studied, leaders need to establish credibility as being serious about immigration law and attuned to the overwhelming public demand for integration as a component of the reciprocal obligations that immigrants and the host society owe to one another. Doing so will require some difficult choices and may not always sit well with activist constituencies that have pushed the Democratic Party to adopt positions on immigration that are deeply out of step with swing voters.

What are the real-world implications of your findings — for policymakers, advocates, or voters?

Policymakers should not interpret today’s anti-immigrant mood or the rise of populism as a sign that they must retreat from the issue or simply play defense. They can still promote good immigration policy as long as it’s grounded in a clear understanding of what the public wants and expects from immigrants.

Voters’ views on immigration are more nuanced than they’re often given credit for. They recognize significant upsides and support multiple aims of immigration policy. They’re willing to pay attention to policy details and are not so locked into an “us versus them” mentality that they reject increases in immigration outright, no matter what. Leaders should recognize this reality rather than falling into the trap of caricaturing the public as xenophobic or close-minded. Those views, while real, are held by only a small minority of respondents across all the countries we surveyed.

Advocates, of course, will push for their preferred agendas, and they play a vital role by informing the public and monitoring for abuse. But if pro-immigration politicians take most of their cues from advocates — whose views often diverge from those of the broader electorate on key issues — they risk losing the public’s trust. And if that happens, we all lose.

What surprised you most about the study findings?

We were surprised by how consistent the effects of policy details were across countries. We had expected persuasion to be easier in the U.S. and Canada, given the centrality of immigration to national identity in both places. But when cultural and economic requirements were presented together, we saw similar results across all the countries we surveyed — Europe and North America alike.

That said, one particularly striking difference emerged in the last experiment we conducted in the U.S., Canada, the UK, France and Germany. Americans were by far the most supportive of a hypothetical policy that simply required immigrants to obtain jobs and be self-sufficient, even when paired with a counterargument warning that they may not assimilate culturally. This underscores how broader political and cultural values shape opinions about immigration. Americans tend to be more comfortable with cultural diversity and to emphasize the norm of self-sufficiency through hard work. That helps explain the especially strong support for policies focused on employment, even when concerns about cultural fit remain.

If you could design a public conversation about immigration based on your findings, what would it look like?

Leaders shaping immigration policy would start by taking voters’ reservations seriously rather than dismissing them as racist, ignorant or short-sighted. The conversation would acknowledge that there are multiple legitimate concerns about large-scale immigration and would aim to clarify those concerns, rather than reflexively dismissing them through so-called “fact checks” or other top-down strategies for “combating misinformation,” which has too often become a euphemism for stifling dissent, however good its intentions.

From there, the conversation would invite open debate about different policy approaches — in full view of the public — and work toward a way forward that can command broad-based support. This kind of honest exchange would consider the economic imperative to continue large-scale immigration, while also addressing the priorities, values and beliefs of the public on whose behalf elected leaders are supposed to govern.

About this research

The study was co-authored by Matthew Wright, associate professor of political science at the University of British Columbia.

The research was supported by Stand Together and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.