Fear of Future Expression: How Political Competition affects Anti-Immigrant Attitudes
How does political competition shape anti-immigrant attitudes? Anti-immigrant attitudes are a much-studied phenomenon in social science, but while the field is extensive, the breadth of explanations is not. Most theories focus on two possibilities, cultural threat and economic threat. While these sets of explanations have been shown to carry weight in models ranging from observational to experimental, they do not capture the whole story. This paper seeks to improve on previous work by explicating a theory of political threat that is distinct from cultural and economic threat while still being connected to them in important ways. Political competition sends signals about potential changes to a person’s material well-being and triggers fear of potential future power loss as a result of changing demographics and population trends. Citizens belonging to political parties that are at risk of missing out on the new voting population brought in by immigration will be more likely to respond negatively to them, even taking into account their potential cultural ties to or animosity towards the immigrants. Evidence for this theory is taken from Peru and Colombia in the midst of the Venezuelan migrant crisis.