By Valentina Di Iasio and Jackline Wahba
This paper examines the effects of natives’ anti-immigration attitudes on migration flows to EU countries. They use panel data for migration to the EU between 1995-2018. They address the potential endogeneity between public attitudes and migration flows using instrumental variable techniques. They also control for the dependence between the attractiveness of alternative EU destinations. Their findings suggest that there is a negative causal relationship between anti-immigration attitudes and migration inflows to the EU; i.e. natives’ hostility drives away immigration. Although the impact of anti-immigration attitudes is larger for non-EU immigration compared to that of intra-EU migration, the elasticity of public attitudes with respect to immigration is higher than that for the elasticity of economic drivers for EU migrants.