Welcoming Immigrants with Similar Occupational Interests: Experimental Survey Evidence from Hong Kong
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321716654923 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
654923PSX0010.1177/0032321716654923Political StudiesLee et al.
research-article2016
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Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(2) 391 –412
Welcoming Immigrants with
© The Author(s) 2016
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Experimental Survey Evidence
from Hong Kong
Siu-yau Lee, Lina Vyas and Kee-lee Chou
Abstract
Recent studies in America and Europe suggest that individual economic self-interest plays little role
in explaining individual attitudes towards immigrants. A key piece of evidence for this proposition
is that natives do not show particular hostility towards immigrants whose skill levels are similar
to their own. We conducted an experimental survey of Hong Kong residents to examine their
attitudes towards immigrants from Mainland China. We found that positive attitudes towards
low-skilled immigrants were more prevalent among local labourers – whose job security would
presumably be under greater threat from them – than among executives and professionals.
Similarly, the premium attached to highly skilled immigrants increases significantly with locals’
occupational prestige, suggesting that immigrants are more likely to find support among natives
who share similar occupational interests. Our results remain robust even after controlling for
a range of potential explanatory variables. We conclude with a critical discussion of the use of
skill levels to estimate the occupational interests of natives and assess the value of relying on
the conventional labour market competition model to generate hypotheses about the role of
economic self-interest in shaping immigration preferences.
Keywords
attitudes towards immigrants, economic self-interest, skill level, labour market competition
Accepted: 3 May 2016
Students of immigration politics have long debated the relative influence of cultural–
psychological factors and economic self-interest on individuals’ attitudes towards immi-
grants. While proponents of cultural–psychological explanations have identified persistent
links between the cultural values and stereotypical beliefs of natives and their attitudes
Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Corresponding author:
Siu-yau Lee, Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping
Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong.
Email: siuylee@ied.edu.hk
392
Political Studies 65 (2)
towards immigrants (Burns and Gimpel, 2000; Citrin et al., 1997; Green, 2009;
Huntington, 2004), interest-based theorists maintain that natives are more likely to
develop hostile attitudes towards those immigrants who are seen as intensifying individ-
ual-level competition for limited economic resources such as jobs, land, education and
housing (Bobo, 1988; Espenshade and Hempstead, 1996; Fetzer, 2000; Gibson, 2002;
Mayda, 2006; Malchow-Møller et al., 2008; Van Dalen and Henkens, 2005). Recent stud-
ies on attitudes towards immigrants in Europe and America, however, provide new evi-
dence contradicting the latter thesis (Emmenegger and Kiemmensen, 2013; Hainmueller
and Hiscox, 2007, 2010; McLaren and Johnson, 2007; Rustenbach, 2010; Sides and
Citrin, 2007). Using innovative research designs and datasets, some of these studies reject
hypotheses that have been logically deduced from the economic concerns of individuals.
Meanwhile, other studies have discovered new variables, such as political ideologies, that
significantly moderate the effects of self-interest.
Despite these methodological advancements, existing tests of interest-based theory
have typically been constrained by their problematic assumptions regarding the relation-
ships between immigrants and natives. Two of these are particularly widespread. First, it
is often assumed that natives’ economic self-interest is largely determined by their skill
level (measured by educational attainment) because natives with different skill levels are
interested in and entitled to occupations of different social status (Facchini and Mayda,
2009; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010; Hanson et al., 2007; Mayda, 2006; Scheve and
Slaughter, 2001). Second, since skill level determines an individual’s occupational inter-
ests, it follows that natives and immigrants with similar skill levels will find themselves
in a competitive relationship in the labour market. Building upon these assumptions, stu-
dents of immigration politics have posited that if economic self-interest matters, natives
will be less well disposed towards immigrants with similar skill levels to their own. Jens
Hainmueller and Michael J Hiscox (2010), for instance, designed an experimental survey
of American citizens based on this thesis and found that both low-skilled and highly
skilled natives strongly preferred highly skilled over low-skilled immigrants. Since highly
skilled natives were expected to see highly skilled immigrants as their competitors in the
labour market, they concluded that occupational concerns played little role in explaining
natives’ anti-immigrant sentiments.
These assumptions, however, must be treated with caution because skill level – espe-
cially when measured by educational attainment – is a noisy measure of to what degree a
native is competing with immigrants in the labour market. Although education is associ-
ated with career success, it is important to note that career outcomes are shaped by a wide
range of factors such as work experience (Borjas, 2003). This is especially true in the
context of highly skilled immigration. While highly skilled immigrants are generally
experienced workers looking for executive or professional jobs, highly educated natives
may well be recent university graduates looking for more junior positions. In many devel-
oped economies, higher education has expanded so much that it is no longer a guarantee
of prestigious occupations (see Lee, 2016). For these reasons, educational attainment is
only a partial predictor of individuals’ occupational interests and their exposure to com-
petition with immigrants. Surveys and tests that rely on educational attainment to gener-
ate hypotheses are not perfectly suited to test the influence of economic self-interest in the
formation of anti-immigrant attitudes.
With this in mind, this study adopts and improves the experimental survey designs of
previous work to examine Hong Kong locals’ attitudes towards immigrants from Mainland
China. To be more specific, our study replaces educational attainment with the occupation
Lee et al.
393
of natives to estimate their economic self-interest and tests whether the latter shapes their
immigration preferences. Previous studies have argued that concerns over job competi-
tion have no bearing on anti-immigrant sentiments, and that natives, regardless of their
own skill level, invariably prefer highly skilled over low-skilled immigrants (Hainmueller
and Hiscox, 2010). Our study suggests a more puzzling picture. Although Hong Kong
locals generally present this preference, the premium attached to highly skilled immi-
grants depreciates significantly with locals’ own occupational prestige.1 Furthermore, we
also find that a positive attitude to low-skilled immigrants is significantly more prevalent
among local labourers, whose interests are supposedly directly threatened by them, than
among native executive and professionals. In other words, our study suggests that low-
skilled immigrants are less likely to be rejected by locals at the bottom end of the job
ladder. These patterns remain significant even after adjusting for a series of explanatory
variables such as gender, stereotype, perceptions of social threat and social contact. As
such, our findings are in sharp contrast to those of similar studies conducted in America
and Europe, which reject the labour market competition thesis by showing that there is no
statistically significant relationship between job market concerns and individual attitudes
towards immigrants.
We address these arguments in three stages in this article. First, we describe the rise of
anti-immigrant sentiment in Hong Kong and the channels through which Mainland
Chinese migrate to the city. Second, we review previous accounts of the relationship
between economic self-interest and attitudes towards immigrants, most of which assess
the former by looking at natives’ educational attainment and assuming that they are all
competing with immigrants with similar skill levels. We explain the pitfalls of this
assumption and propose a modified survey experiment to test the relationship. Finally, we
present and discuss the results of our tests.
Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Hong Kong
Anti-immigrant sentiment has been on the rise in Hong Kong in the past decade, as eco-
nomic ties with Mainland China (the source of most immigration2) have deepened. While
anti-immigrant discussions were mostly found in cyberspace, in recent years, many Hong
Kong natives have begun to express their dissatisfaction in a more confrontational man-
ner. In 2012, for example, an online group in Hong Kong raised money to place an adver-
tisement in a major local newspaper to call for an end to the ‘unlimited infiltration of
Mainland Chinese couples into Hong Kong’. This anti-Mainland sentiment reached a far
wider array of social groups than simply the ‘extreme right’. According to a telephone
poll...
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