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The migrant caravan is comprised of thousands of people traveling from Central America to the Mexico–U.S. border seeking refuge from their home countries. In news coverage, images of the caravan regularly portray large groups of immigrants walking toward the border. What are the consequences of this depiction on attitudes toward immigration? We suggest that images of groups of immigrants, in contrast with images of individual immigrants, will tend to decrease support for immigration. In 2019, we preregistered and ran a web-based survey experiment in the United States in which respondents read a news story with either an image of immigrants in a crowd setting, an image of an individual immigrant, or a control condition. The group treatment produces no systematic increase in anti-immigrant sentiment relative to the control. However, we do find differences in the group and individual treatments for respondents who are high in threat sensitivity. Findings are discussed as they relate to recent work on the roles of both fear and person positivity in attitudes about immigration, as well as the potential importance of editorial choices in the portrayal of immigration to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada has often been seen as immune from the powerful backlash against globalization and immigration that has driven political shifts elsewhere. This article challenges this belief, at least in part, by tracing the evolution of public attitudes toward immigration and analyzing the factors that have shaped the trajectory for over three decades. Drawing on nearly forty years of Environics Focus Canada surveys, combined with annual data on macro-economics and immigration flows, findings here suggest that Canadians' tolerance toward immigration responds to immigration flows and is heavily influenced by macro-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While widespread resistance to immigration is well established in advanced democracies around the world, the role of group-specific stereotyping in anti-immigration sentiment has received limited attention. We derive a novel measurement model to assess stereotyping in three Anglo-Saxon democracies – the US, Canada, and the UK – of the modal outgroup in each country (Hispanics in the US and South Asians in Canada and the UK) and Middle Easterners/Muslims. We show that considerable variation exists in degree of stereotyping against the two major immigrant groups. In the US case, we additionally document over-time variation in group stereotyping. In a final step, we demonstrate a relationship between group antipathies and immigration policy views, akin to other policy domains in which public support varies by the ethnic characteristics of policy beneficiaries. To our knowledge, this study is the first to map stereotypes of Muslims in the US in a comparative setting and over time after 09/11, and amongst the first to link views on immigration policies to group-based stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data collected in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, this article examines the determinants of attitudes toward immigrants. In particular, we draw on the literature in social psychology to explore the role of locus of control in promoting more ethnocentric and restrictive attitudes towards immigration. We conceptualize control at three levels: (1) perceptions of individual locus of control (i.e., feeling that one can control one's own circumstances), (2) perceptions of societal control (i.e., feeling that one's country has control over immigration), and (3) perceptions of an outgroup's locus of control (i.e., feeling that an outgroup's social circumstances are attributable to dispositional rather than external factors). Results show that all three measures of control are important predictors of negative attitudes toward immigrants: Those who feel in control (personally or as a society) are less hostile towards immigrants, while those who attribute negative outcomes to immigrants' predispositions are also more hostile. Results also suggest that measures of control are related to, but distinct from, both partisanship and racial prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant integration is currently a prominent issue in virtually all contemporary democracies, but countries in which the historic population itself is deeply divided - particularly those with substate nations and multiple political identities - present some interesting questions where integration is concerned. The existence of multiple and potentially competing political identities may complicate the integration process, particularly if the central government and the substate nation promote different conceptions of citizenship and different nation-building projects. What, then, are the implications of minority nationalism for immigrant integration? Are the added complexities a barrier to integration? Or do overlapping identities generate more points of contact between immigrants and their new home? This article addresses this question by probing immigrant and non-immigrant 'sense of belonging' in Canada, both inside and outside Quebec. Data come from Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Study. Our results suggest that competing nation-building projects make the integration of newcomers more, rather than less, challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]