Informing is Half the Battle. How Information Can Change Attitudes towards Immigrants

DIEGO UBFAL AND TWO COLLEAGUES SHOW THAT PEOPLE PROVIDED WITH TRUE FIGURES ABOUT IMMIGRATION TEND TO REDUCE THEIR HOSTILITY. ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICANS

Governments could improve the attitudes towards immigrants with a simple, inexpensive and effective intervention: providing correct information about the immigrant population. That’s the main policy implication of Does Information Change Attitudes towards Immigrants? Evidence from Survey Experiments, a working paper by Bocconi Department of Economics’ Diego Ubfal and University of Oxford’s Alexis Grigorieff and Christopher Roth.
 
All around the developed world people overestimate the share of immigrants in their country and have biased beliefs about them. In Italy, for instance, the average estimate of the immigrant population is 24%, while the true share is 7%; in the US the figures are 37% and 13%. “And even though past literature posits that providing information doesn’t have a strong effect on perceptions and preferences, we were not convinced”, Prof. Ubfal says.
 
The scholars, then, analyzed the results of the Transatlantic Trends Survey (TTS), a large survey with nearly 20,000 respondents. In the TTS half the sample was asked if immigrants are too many, while the other half was provided with information about the share of immigrants and only then asked if immigrants are too many. Information turned out to have a strong effect: the percentage of Italians considering immigrants too numerous is 51% among the uninformed and 28% among the informed; American figures are 39% and 23%.
 
“Providing information only about the share of immigrants is a light intervention, though, and the survey doesn’t allow us to examine whether the effects are permanent. Thus we designed our own online survey for the US, using Amazon MTurk”, Ubfal continues. First, all the 800 respondents were asked to estimate figures regarding immigrants, which they wildly overestimated: share of immigrants (estimated 22% vs. correct 13%), of illegal immigrants (14% vs. 3%), of unemployed immigrants (22% vs. 6%), of incarcerated immigrants (13% vs. 2%) and of non English speaking immigrants (33% vs. 8%). Half the sample was, then, provided with the correct figures and the survey went on with questions about attitudes and policy preferences. The information turned out to have a strong effect on self reported attitudes and a small, but statistically significant, effect on self reported policy preferences.
 
The survey showed that information has some effect also on behavior, as respondents provided with information were 30% more willing to donate to a pro-immigrants charity. The effect does, though, not extend to political behavior, as no difference was reported in signing a petition asking for more Green Cards (the authorization to live in the US).
 
Those most affected by information were the most worried about immigration. Providing information displays a larger effects on Republicans than on Democrats. A follow-up survey a month later showed that the information effect persists.
 
“Our results are promising”, Ubfal says, “and we are planning to extend the analysis to a sample representative of the US population and, maybe, to Europe. We are now trying to understand why such a strong bias exists, even though information about immigrants is publicly available. Don’t people really care? Is information difficult to retrieve? Does media disinformation play a role?”.

by Fabio Todesco