When Do Citizens Care About Immigration? Studying the Political Salience and Valence of Immigration Attitudes in Colombia

Abstract

When does the public care about immigration? A rich body of work offers theory and evidence to understand when people will hold positive or negative attitudes about immigration. Little work, however, explores how people rank the importance of immigration relative to other issues. This is important as people’s beliefs that immigration harms or benefits their country is of little political significance if they assess these impacts as of relatively little importance. In other words, we know a great deal about the drivers of the political valence of immigration, but little about the drivers of its political salience. We propose running survey experiments with Colombians across the country to test for impacts of a range of political, economic, and social concerns on the valence and the salience of people’s attitudes about Venezuelan immigration. We will run two surveys to separately test egotropic and sociotropic drivers.