Replication data for: Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact

What explains variation in individuals’ opposition to immigration? The extant literature has focused on two main forms of threat as underlying sources of opposition: economic and cultural. While scholars have consistently shown cultural concerns to be strong predictors of opposition to immigration, findings regarding the labor market competition hypothesis are highly contested. To help understand these divergent results, we distinguish between the prevalence and conditional impact of determinants of attitudes on immigration. Leveraging a targeted sampling strategy of high-technology counties, we conduct an in-depth study of Americans’ attitudes towards H-1B visas. The plurality of these visas are occupied by Indian immigrants, who are highly skilled but ethnically and culturally distinct, enabling us to measure a specific set of skills (high-technology) that are threatened by a particular type of immigrant (H-1B visa holders). Unlike recent aggregate studies, our targeted approach finds that the conditional impact of the relationship in the high-technology sector between economic threat and immigration policy attitudes is sizeable, a result confirmed by a range of robustness checks. However, because most people do not face labor market competition from immigrants in their particular economic sector, the influence of economic threat on attitudes is not prevalent, and therefore is generally not detected in aggregate analyses. The findings suggest that economic threat is more relevant when analyzing low-salience policy debates dominated by interest groups, yet is a limited factor in explaining general anti-immigration attitudes on high-salience issues of concern to the broader public.