Natives’ skills and attitudes towards immigrants: evidence from 20 OECD countries

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether natives’ attitudes toward immigration is associated with an influx of high- and low-skilled immigrants. The current research focuses on selected 20 OECD countries as destination countries.

A pseudo-panel based on age cohort is constructed to control for the potential unobservable individual characteristics. The random effects and within estimators (where applicable) are applied in the panel-data setting.

Regression results indicate that natives’ attitudes depend on their labor market exposure and skill type. Low-skill immigrant inflows are negatively associated with natives’ attitudes, but the magnitude is reduced proportionally to their share of the high skilled. The association between immigrant flows and attitudes is particularly strong for the prime-age cohorts, which can be explained by the labor market competition mechanism.

Given the data limitations, not all destination countries could be analyzed but only selected OECD countries. However, this situation has resulted in the sample destination countries sharing similar characteristics with advanced economies.

Although the majority of previous studies are based on survey questions on attitudes toward immigrants with respective skill type, the current study focuses on the effects of the actual immigration flows. Natives’ attitudes respond sensitively to the actual changes in the number of migrants. The selection of OECD countries makes the characteristics of the destination countries substantially homogeneous.