Understanding Public Ambivalence about Immigration: The Role of Legal Heuristics

Many Europeans are ambivalent about migration, simultaneously recognizing both its benefits and its challenges as a social phenomenon. This study investigates public support for migration policies and how the preferences of ambivalent individuals respond to legal heuristics. To answer these research questions, we conducted an original online conjoint experiment on migration policy preferences fielded as part of a survey to a representative sample of six European countries: Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden. We consider a range of preferences of 9,000 respondents that evaluate 90,0000 policies that randomly differ across migration policy areas including asylum, refugee resettlement, labor migration, and border control. We find that moderate and ambivalent participants systematically privilege legality-based distinctions when supporting multidimensional migration policies. These patterns are consistent with our argument that legality-based heuristics predict migration policy support among the ambivalent majority. Our results imply that migration policies that provide legal bases for admission, establish conditional pathways to regularization, and condition rights on recognized status are more likely to obtain majority support.