Does Information Change Attitudes Towards Immigrants? Representative Evidence from Survey Experiments (nominated to the Juan Luis Londoño Prize to best paper on social issues by a young researcher)

We study whether providing information about immigrants affects people’s attitude towards them. First, we use a large representative cross-country experiment to show that, when people are told the share of immigrants in... [ view full abstract ]

We study whether providing information about immigrants affects people’s
attitude towards them. First, we use a large representative cross-country experiment to show that, when people are told the share of immigrants in their country, they become less likely to state that  there are too many of them. Then, we conduct two online experiments in the U.S., where we provide half of the participants with five  statistics about immigration. This more comprehensive intervention improves people’s attitude towards existing  immigrants, although it does not, on average, change people’s policy preferences regarding immigration. Results are much stronger for Republicans, and they persist at least one month.