Contribution as a national expert to the project "Joint Programming Initiative – Fast Track Project on Demographic Change and Migration"

This report surveys the literature on the determinants of attitudes to immigration. It shows that despite some methodological and data limitations the respective literature has made substantial progress in recent years. This applies to uncovering some of the robust correlates of negative attitudes to migration such as stronger anti-immigrant sentiments among whites, the less educated and older people, those dissatisfied with the economy, leaning to the political right, or living in a rural region. In addition, this overview has identified some research gaps despite this emerging consensus. These are: first, the still rather underdeveloped research on the impact of different conceptual and measurement issues on results which often questions the comparability of different results and sometimes also leads to tensions between some of the results from different strands of the literature; second the limited number of contributions using experimental or quasi-experimental methods to test for the causality of effects.