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Are Immigrants in Favour of Immigration? Evidence from England and Wales

  • Nils Braakmann , Muhammad Waqas EMAIL logo and John Wildman
Published/Copyright: February 3, 2017

Abstract

Using the UK Citizenship Survey for the years 2007–2010, this paper investigates how immigrants view immigration and how these views compare to the views of natives. Immigrants who have been in the UK longer are similar to natives in being opposed to further immigration, while recent immigrants are more in favour of further immigration. Labour market concerns do not play a large role for either immigrants or natives. However, there is some evidence that financial and economic shocks can increase anti-immigration sentiments.

JEL Classification: J15; J61; J82

Acknowledgement

Muhammad Waqas would like to acknowledge the funding from the Peter and Norah Lomas PhD Scholarship in Economics. All analyses used Stata 13. Do-files and data are available from the authors on request. All views are those of the authors.

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Published Online: 2017-2-3

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