(HYBRID) Brown Bag Research Series: Immigration is Difficult?! Informing Voters About Immigration Policy Fosters Pro-immigration Views

Explore, engage, elevate! Join the Cambio Center for the Brown Bag Research Series — where students and faculty come together to share, learn and collaborate. Our topic for this Brown Bag is "Immigration is Difficult?! Informing Voters About Immigration Policy Fosters Pro-immigration Views", presented by Dr. Michelangelo Landgrave. To attend virtually, please follow meeting link provided.

This Brown Bag series is hosted in collaboration with the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. For MU Engage event link please visit our page at https://engage.missouri.edu/cambiocenter/events/

Abstract:
The US public significantly lacks knowledge about immigration. While various attempts to correct misperceptions have generally failed to change people's minds about the issue, it is possible that this failure has been the result of not providing relevant information. We argue that informing the public about the difficulty of the legal immigration admission process could be an effective, perspective-changing way to raise support for more open immigration. We test and confirm this hypothesis using a nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 1000) that informs respondents about US immigration's administrative burdens and restrictions through short verifiable narratives. We also provide the first evidence of the widespread ignorance about the immigration process across diverse political and demographic groups. Our results suggest that providing a new perspective on the immigration process's difficulty has more promise to change public policy preferences than challenging skeptics’ crystallized beliefs about immigration's effects or numbers.

Cambio Center | Website | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Inclusion, Diversity & Equity

Contact the organizers