Abstract
Historically, immigration has been a topic of heated public and political debate, where public beliefs about immigrants are often shaped by stereotypes and persistent misperceptions. Immigration has also become an economically salient issue, in the view of population aging and a shrinking labor force on the one hand and with the concerns about its contribution to the unemployment on the other. This paper studies how information provision and narratives affect reported beliefs about immigrants, corresponding moral evaluations, and policy preferences. We conduct a multi-wave randomized survey experiment in Russia, that largely builds on Alesina et al. (2023) to ensure international comparability. The experiment contrasts factual and emotional narratives aimed at shifting misperceptions. Our major contribution, besides expanding geographical coverage to a country that has a large, diverse and persistent immigration flows and multi-ethnic population, is to introduce a pragmatic economic narrative in both text and video formats (including a salience-enhanced variant) that frames immigration as an economic input, essential for economic growth in a country with shrinking population. In each wave, respondents report baseline characteristics, are randomly assigned to an intervention, and then answer a common set of post-treatment questions. We also collect standard demographic covariates and apply pre-specified attention checks and exclusion rules.
Our analysis focuses on three questions. First, we examine whether baseline beliefs are distorted in stereotypical directions, especially on salient dimensions such as crime and immigrants’ origins. Second, we test whether different informational treatments reduce immigration-related misperceptions. We further examine whether narrative interventions operate through distinct channels, for example by affecting moral attributions and support for inclusive policies. Third, we examine how heightened threat salience changes the effectiveness of different narratives. Exploiting the close timing of fieldwork around a salient violent event associated with immigrants, we test whether heightened salience makes respondents less responsive to pragmatic economic arguments and more responsive to moral narratives, or whether it instead makes them harder to persuade regardless of the message.
Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, Stefanie Stantcheva, Immigration and Redistribution, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 90, Issue 1, January 2023, Pages 1–39, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdac011