Replication Data for: Americans’ Opposition to Muslim Immigration: Untangling Religion from Country of Origin

Does an immigrant’s country of origin shape Americans’ immigration preferences? If so, are some attributes of origin countries likely to provoke particularly strong opposition over others? We answer these questions using three conjoint experimental studies that focus on one of these potential attributes: religion. In doing so we find consistent evidence of strong opposition to immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Furthermore, individual Muslim immigrants face stronger opposition than non-Muslims, independently of their origin countries. Aversion to Muslim immigration is found across the partisan divide, even though it is lower among Democrats than among Republicans. Our findings suggest that exclusionary immigration policies aimed at Muslims, like President Donald Trump’s travel ban, can have non-trivial support amongst the American public. Methodologically, we demonstrate the limitations of relying on country of origin as a catch-all attribute in conjoint experiments and suggest that, instead, researchers should directly manipulate the relevant characteristics of potential immigrants.