The literature on Christian nationalism has expanded and matured quickly. Nonetheless, few pieces have documented the measurement properties of its namesake concept, and those that have trumpet conclusions that vary from “the most common measure is flawed” to “Christian nationalism is highly robust to measurement variance.” To address this emerging measurement controversy, we start by exploring the factor structure of 10 datasets containing the 6 original Baylor Religion Survey items. We then investigate the factor structure and estimated relationships supported by both these items and a range of additional Christian nationalism questions. Our overwhelming conclusion is that Christian nationalism is a multifaceted concept and a small number of items are capable of effectively tapping it.

Economic crises, technological change, and labor market transformations have long shaped political attitudes, particularly toward immigration. While existing research links occupational risks to anti-immigration preferences, which specific occupations drive this relationship remains underexplored. This research note addresses this gap by examining how occupation-specific skills (OSS) – defined as the amount of skills required to work in a given occupation – moderate the relationship between occupational labor market conditions and immigration attitudes. Drawing on sociological and comparative political economy perspectives, the paper argues that individuals with high levels of OSS are especially sensitive to deterioration in their occupation’s labor market conditions. The central theoretical implication is that adverse changes in occupational labor markets generate stronger political anti-immigration reactions among high-OSS workers, including Managers and (Associate) Professionals. Importantly, OSS are conceptually distinct from other occupational dimensions used in the literature, such as task specificity, and from other skill dimensions, such as general skill. The empirical analysis draws on over 20 years of longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), finding evidence consistent with the argument. The findings contribute to ongoing debates about the political behavior of high-skilled workers, a group whose attitudes toward immigration remain contested.

Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding individual-level factors shaping immigration attitudes. However, we know far less about the top-down influence of political elites on such attitudes. In this review, we synthesise scholarly evidence to examine how elite discourse affects public opinion about immigration. We propose that immigration preferences are best understood through three dimensions of public opinion: attitude extremity (the degree to which individuals support or oppose immigration), attitude importance (the extent to which they consider immigration to be an important issue), and attitude expression (the behavioural manifestation of immigration attitudes). Our review suggests that elite rhetoric has a limited effect on the extremity of immigration attitudes, as these preferences are typically rooted in long-standing belief systems and shaped early in life. Isolating the influence of elites on the importance of immigration as an issue is more complex, as shifts in public concern often coincide with changes in elite discourse and media coverage, all of which are shaped by external events. However, our review indicates that political elites can play a significant role in shaping the expression of immigration attitudes – both at the ballot box and in everyday social interactions. These insights have important implications for identifying pressing research gaps and for understanding the politicisation of immigration in contemporary politics.

Research on public attitudes toward immigration consistently shows that people prefer higher- over lower-skilled immigrants, largely for sociotropic economic and fiscal reasons. We argue that this account is incomplete: citizens also evaluate immigrant workers according to the essentiality and social value of the work they perform, alongside formal skills and education. We conceptualize two logics for evaluating occupations – economic-fiscal and moral-social – that shape attitudes toward labor immigrants, before testing this argument in two studies in the UK. Study 1 uses a preregistered conjoint survey experiment (N = 4,951) fielded during the UK’s third COVID-19 lockdown in January 2021. Respondents evaluated hypothetical labor immigrants varying in occupation, skill level, and origin. Immigrants working in occupations designated as ‘essential’ during the pandemic were substantially more likely to be preferred for admission (by about 22 percentage points) and more likely to be viewed as economically beneficial (by about 10 percentage points) than those in nonessential jobs, net of skill. Study 2 reports results from an online survey (N = 1,944) fielded in 2025 measuring perceptions of occupational essentiality, social value, economic value, prestige, skill, and labor shortages. Perceived essentiality is strongly associated with social value while remaining distinct from skill and prestige. Importantly, perceptions of occupational essentiality remained stable over time and correlated with preferences for admitting immigrants in those same occupations. Together, these findings highlight occupational essentiality as a distinct and consequential driver of immigration attitudes with implications for labor migration debates and policymaking.

While immigration status is often arbitrarily ascribed, the moral meanings of undocumented status are central in the growing polarization and punitiveness of immigration politics in the United States. How do political actors construct the moral meanings of undocumented status and reason their preferred redresses? Existing substantialist approach’s search for a coherent list of moral traits is unable to locate the basis of such construction. Through interviews with a multiracial group of 65 Democratic and Republican activists, this paper identifies the relational meaning-making process underlying the construction of migrant morality, which I label as “Folk Durkheimian.” I find that, like Durkheim, activists believe that law exists to uphold social solidarities and therefore legal categories mark people as belonging or threatening to the social body. I further find that activists construct belonging and threat along two axes: similarity and division of labor. As both Democratic and Republican activists construct migrants as simultaneously belonging and threatening on different axes, both prefer the ambivalent redress of pathways to citizenship for a limited subset of migrants. This Folk Durkheimian understanding advances a relational and integrated framework for understanding morality, group politics, and punitive attitudes.

We examine the impact of exposure to immigrants during formative years on attitudes toward immigration later on in life. Our research design combines granular administrative data on immigrant shares in Germany with longitudinal individual-level data on immigration sentiment. Using panel fixed-effect estimates, identification leverages both spatial variation at critical ages and time variation induced by birth cohorts. We find that individuals exposed to higher shares of immigrants in formative years exhibit more negative attitudes toward immigration in adulthood. The impact is small in magnitude but specific to critical age and robust to contemporaneous immigration exposure. Our findings suggest that early and unmediated exposure to a diverse social and ethnic environment may have long-lasting consequences for the formation of immigration preferences.

As the number of immigrants into middle-income countries continues to rise, so do concerns about host nations’ increasing anti-immigration responses. Existing studies in high-income countries present promising pathways to promote immigrant inclusion. In particular, exposing host-nation members to immigrant personal narratives increases positive feelings towards immigrants and support for inclusionary policies. We assess whether, in a middle-income country where immigration’s economic impact is salient to host-nation members, immigrant narratives need to address this impact so that they can influence attitudes. Meta-analysis estimates from three survey experiments in Colombia conducted between 2021 and 2023 suggest that narrative-based interventions need not engage with economic concerns to promote positive affect towards immigrants, but when they address economic concerns they can also increase support for open immigration policies. Given that these narratives also reduce economic concerns, we find that the conditions for inclusionary interventions to be most effective are nuanced in middle-income migrant destinations.

Immigration has historically been of low salience in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, the region has consistently higher levels of ethnocentrism than the rest of Europe. Scholars argue that the East's limited politicization of immigration is due to its status as a region of emigration and the presence of ethnic minority ‘others’. I argue that this is changing. The politicization of the European refugee crisis by domestic elites has begun to refocus the sociocultural dimension on the immigration issue. Using structural equation models, I compare European Values Study data from 2008 and 2017 across 10 East European EU member states. I find evidence that traditionalist attitudes are more strongly related to anti‐immigration attitudes since the crisis, particularly for those who are interested in politics. Further, immigration attitudes are polarizing across the GAL‐TAN dimension and by education. Hence, immigration is bolstering a pre‐existing, socially structured divide around both nationalist and traditionalist values.

This article explores the causal effect of personal contact with ethnic minorities on majority members’ views on immigration, immigrants’ work ethics, and support for lower social assistance benefits to immigrants than to natives. Exogenous variation in personal contact is obtained by randomising soldiers into different rooms during the basic training period for conscripts in the Norwegian Army's North Brigade. Based on contact theory of majority–minority relations, the study spells out why the army can be regarded as an ideal contextual setting for exposure to reduce negative views on minorities. The study finds a substantive effect of contact on views on immigrants’ work ethics, but small and insignificant effects on support for welfare dualism, as well as on views on whether immigration makes Norway a better place in which to live.

Does a large influx of asylum seekers in the local community lead to a backlash in public opinion towards foreign populations? We assess the effects of asylum seeker presence using original survey and macro‐level municipality data from Austria, exploiting exogenous elements of the placement of asylum seekers on the municipality level. Methodologically, we draw on entropy balancing for causal identification. Our findings are threefold. First, respondents in municipalities receiving asylum seekers report substantially higher exposure on average, but largely without the stronger contact that would allow for meaningful interaction. Second, hostility towards asylum seekers on average increased in areas that housed them. Third, this backlash spilt over: general attitudes towards Muslims and immigrants are less favourable in contexts with local asylum seeker presence, while vote intention for the main anti‐immigration party is higher. Our findings go beyond existing work by examining contact directly as a mechanism, by showing a backlash effect in the medium term, and by focusing on a broad set of attitudinal and behavioural measures. Our results point to a need to design policy interventions that minimise citizen backlash against rapid migration inflows.

In the study of deliberation, a largely under‐explored area is why some participants polarise their opinion after deliberation and why others moderate them. Opinion polarisation is usually considered a suspicious outcome of deliberation, while moderation is seen as a desirable one. This article takes issue with this view. Results from a Finnish deliberative experiment on immigration show that polarisers and moderators were not different in socioeconomic, cognitive or affective profiles. Moreover, both polarisation and moderation can entail deliberatively desired pathways: in the experiment, both polarisers and moderators learned during deliberation, levels of empathy were fairly high on both sides, and group pressures barely mattered. Finally, the low physical presence of immigrants in some discussion groups was associated with polarisation in the anti‐immigrant direction, bolstering longstanding claims regarding the importance of presence for democratic politics.

A vast body of literature studies how national identities explain immigration attitudes. In Europe, however, migration policy is largely Europeanised, requiring a European perspective. This article distinguishes between civic and cultural European identities and theorises how the two identity types relate to characteristics of immigrants with respect to admission decisions. Among others, we introduce the novel hypothesis that value congruence among Europeans and immigrants matters. The analyses of observational data and conjoint experiments show that Europeans with a cultural identity hold more restrictive attitudes; civics particularly prioritise immigrants who share their own values, while culturals more strongly reject immigrants who are culturally distant (ie Afghans and Muslims). Despite these differences, the following finding stands out: The more distant immigrants are perceived, the less likely they are to be admitted by Europeans from both identity types, raising serious questions about the role of humanitarian reasons in immigration decisions.

While prior studies have consistently linked immigration attitudes with public support for the welfare state, it is not yet clear how individuals process immigrant-related information in their home contexts and combine that with their existing immigration attitudes to update their attitudes toward the welfare state. In this paper, we consider how context (i.e., immigrant welfare participation rates in individuals’ home states) works in tandem with immigration attitudes to shape Americans’ support for the welfare state. We merge state contextual data on the welfare consumption rates of immigrants with micro-level public opinion data from the Cumulative American National Election Survey (CANES) for the years from 2004 to 2016. Our results suggest that individuals’ immigration attitudes and the degree of immigrant welfare participation in their home contexts combine to influence Americans’ welfare spending attitudes. More specifically, among individuals with unfavorable immigration attitudes, higher levels of immigrant welfare participation in their state contexts lead to significantly lower levels of welfare support. Likewise, in states with high-immigrant welfare participation rates, negative immigration attitudes have a stronger negative effect on welfare support. These findings suggest that Americans’ support for the welfare state is not only determined by their existing immigration attitudes but also the reality of immigrant welfare usage in their home contexts.

Many recent applications of the “Unexpected Event during Survey Design” (UESD) analyze single cases of frequently occurring events. In this research note, I question the generalizability of research findings obtained this way and demonstrate the empirical benefits of the “Multiple Unexpected Events during Survey Design” (MUESD). I conduct 15 large-scale replications (total N = 101,940) of a new UESD analyzing the effects of Mediterranean shipwrecks on immigration attitudes. Previous research suggests that such events drastically reduce anti-immigration attitudes among the European public, presumably through an empathy-based mechanism. However, after 15 of the most lethal shipwrecks since 2013, anti-immigration attitudes were reduced in only one case of exceptionally high salience and to a much lesser degree than originally found.

What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

Education is widely believed to predict attitudes toward immigration, but what causal relationship underlies this descriptive pattern? This research employs three distinct natural experiments and considers genetic factors to triangulate this relationship: Study 1 analyses discordant monozygotic twins; Study 2 assesses the impact of a Swedish education reform; and Study 3 analyses dizygotic twins with the use of a polygenic index for education, a DNA-based measure for genetic predispositions toward education. The results indicate that education does modestly promote open views toward immigration (Study 1), yet the reform’s effect remains uncertain (Study 2). Study 3 offers direct evidence of the effects of genetic predispositions and suggests that genetics related to education may influence attitudes beyond achieved educational attainment. These findings confirm the positive impact of education while pointing to the combined influence of genetic and social pathways in shaping immigration attitudes.

There is a large discrepancy in European countries between the measured impact of immigration on the welfare state and how this impact is perceived by citizens. This study examines the determinants of individuals’ perception of the impact of immigration on the welfare state. A number of hypotheses at both the individual and contextual level are tested using a multilevel model with data from the European Social Survey. I find that the institutional features of welfare states are associated with different views on the impact of immigration on welfare states: generous contributory social welfare benefits are associated with more favourable attitudes about immigrants, while generous non-contributory benefits, by contrast, are associated with more pessimistic assessments about the fiscal impact of immigration. I argue that this can be because the latter potentially signals to natives that migrants could access generous benefits without any requisite work history. At the individual-level, the results indicate that subjective risk and general opposition to immigration are powerful individual-level predictors: people who feel more economically insecure or who are generally opposed to immigration are more likely to think that it constitutes a burden for the welfare state.

This article provides an overview of the literature on the relationship between terrorism and migration. It discusses whether and how (1) migration may be a cause of terrorism, (2) terrorism may influence natives' attitudes towards immigration and their electoral preferences and (3) terrorism may lead to more restrictive migration policies and how these in turn may serve as effective counter-terrorism tools. A review of the empirical literature on the migration–terrorism nexus indicates that (1) there is little evidence that more migration unconditionally leads to more terrorist activity, especially in Western countries, (2) terrorism has electoral and political (but sometimes short-lived) ramifications, for example, as terrorism promotes anti-immigrant resentment and (3) the effectiveness of stricter migration policies in deterring terrorism is rather limited, while terrorist attacks lead to more restrictive migration policies.

The sociocultural divide in Western Europe is increasingly focused on issues of national identity, namely immigration. It is commonly assumed that opponents of immigration also exhibit conservatism on other sociocultural issues. Yet recent research suggests that general social conservatism is declining in the region. Do immigration attitudes fit squarely into the sociocultural dimension? Using survey data from eleven West European countries, as well as a Dutch household panel from 2007–2019, this study finds that gender attitudes, a key sociocultural issue, are subject to change through both cohort and life cycle effects, while immigration attitudes are stable over the course of the panel and exhibit little variation across cohorts. Immigration attitudes also appear to be immune to period effects resulting from the 2015 refugee crisis. Further, those born during and after the ‘post-materialist revolution’ have weakened associations between these two attitudes, while older individuals' attitudes are strongly correlated. The combination of gender egalitarianism and anti-immigrant sentiment may become increasingly common as acceptance of the former spreads, while immigration remains a hotly contested issue.

Are the predictors of anti-immigration attitudes consistent across countries with diverse immigration histories and policies? We hypothesize that the key predictors of opposition to immigration are indeed relatively consistent across industrial nations. We test this hypothesis with two surveys using probability samples of German citizens. We then compare our findings with those obtained in recent studies of immigration opinions in Europe generally, and in two of the world's leading immigration-receiving nations: Canada and the United States. Striking similarities emerge in the findings across structural, demographic, contact, economic, political, personality, and threat predictors. Opposition to immigration is routinely found strongest among the older and less-educated segments of the population who live in areas with anti-immigration norms and little contact with immigrants. Anti-immigration attitudes also correlate with political conservatism and alienation, economic deprivation, and especially with authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and perceived collective threat.