If an immigrant wants to be accepted in the country they arrive to, they must be a young woman, with a high qualification and who already has a good job. It also counts if you speak the language and belong to the dominant religion of the host society. That is the ideal portrait that results from a large study published in , in which thousands of participants from dozens of countries chose from thirty attributes. This idealized profile also has its reverse: the least accepted are those who come from Muslim countries, come for economic reasons, or have a disability.
“The participants in the experiments had to imagine that they were immigration officials who had to select immigrants to be admitted,” says researcher at Harvard University (United States) and first author of the study, Marco Aviña. It is actually a meta-analysis, a review of other works. Aviña and his group gathered a hundred investigations in which a total of 142,817 people from 36 countries participated. All experiments have a similar design. “Generally, they are presented with two immigrant profiles side by side that vary based on their attributes such as age, gender, education [así hasta 26 características] and they had to decide who they accepted,” details Aviña, a Mexican immigrant who grew up and trained in Canada.
In demographic attributes, there is a slight but widespread preference for women over men and for young people over older people. Even disability scores against, although Aviña quickly clarifies that there are only a few studies that asked about this characteristic.
Regarding socioeconomic data, a paradox occurs. “Typically, participants select the immigrants they believe will contribute,” says the Harvard researcher. Hence they prefer those who arrive with high qualifications. But host societies tend to need to fill the gaps not filled by nationals. Another inconsistency: although those seeking asylum or fleeing violence (as happened at the beginning of the war) are preferred over economic immigrants, those who arrive with some type of trauma are penalized.
Mastering the language of the host country offers a 10-point advantage over not speaking it. Of the other sociocultural attributes, the majority prefer immigrants who are agnostic or atheist and, if not, who have the same religious confession as that of the host society. “The nationality does not matter, what matters more are the cultural attributes. In Spain, for example, it is not more relevant if someone is from a Latin American country, but rather that they speak Spanish, that they are Catholic, that there is a background common culture,” explains Aviña.
Coming from a Muslim country is the lowest rated attribute. “We found a clear penalty against immigrants from Muslim countries. It is repeated in any European or North American country,” says Aviña. But also in remote Australia, South Korea or Japan, there is suspicion towards Muslims. “If the studies include this attribute, they include it because the hypothesis is that people are intolerant towards Muslims because they are perceived as less willing to integrate,” he concludes.
The work, one of the largest of this type carried out to date, also allows us to go in the opposite direction: to search among the participants’ traits for the explanation of their preferences. Beyond the fact that the elderly had a slight preference for young women and who were of the same religious denomination, there were hardly any differences based on the age, gender, education or income that those assigned to immigration officials had.
But things change with ideology. In general, those who declare themselves left/liberal tend to be more pro-immigration than conservatives. They also differ in the attributes they select: leftists value socioeconomic factors more, while those on the right take sociocultural factors more into account when accepting or rejecting an immigrant.
Economic hostility has increased
The researchers also detected changes in the preferences of supposed immigration officials over time. “What we observed is that, compared to studies carried out approximately a decade ago, in recent years people seem to show a greater preference for young, highly qualified migrants with a good command of the language of the destination country,” says Reed Rasband, researcher at Brigham Young University (United States) and co-author of the study.
There is another piece of information that shows how the weight of economics has grown: since 2020, the participants who now take more into account what immigrants can contribute are precisely those with the lowest socioeconomic status in the host society. “We do not know with certainty why the preference for these socioeconomic traits has become more pronounced in recent years, but we do not believe that this change is due to changes in research methodology. It is a topic that deserves more research,” he concludes.
Sergi Pardos-Prado, professor of comparative politics at the University of Glasgow (United Kingdom), has been researching attitudes towards immigrants for years. “In political science, economic factors had been put more into question,” he says. Sociocultural aspects, religion, language, culture had more weight. “But this work reinforces the idea that the economy does matter, especially in recent years,” adds Reed.
In the field of economic competition, Pardos-Prado recalls that “the classic economic channel is that of competition for work, for the labor market.” But this research broadens the focus. “There are other economic channels that typically have not been studied very well.” One is competition for the fruits of the welfare state, such as its social aid. “The classic tax pressure theory predicted that the highest incomes were the most hostile to immigrants, because they raised the bill. What we see now is that the tax burden has been transferred to the lowest incomes,” explains the researcher.
It is not so much that immigrants compete for benefits, “but rather that middle and low incomes perceive a greater tax burden than they receive.” And for this reason, the researcher concludes, “in recent years, we have working class groups that, paradoxically, are now voting for far-right parties, with very individualistic, anti-welfare state and anti-immigrant narratives.”
