My book investigates how new waves of immigration affect how citizens in migrant destinations interact with other previously arrived immigrants. Although most immigrant destinations worldwide host multinational immigrant populations, the effects of repeated migration on political and social relations remain poorly understood. While many conventional approaches expect new migration to worsen natives’ negative views of immigrants in general, my results indicate that such arrivals actually improve relationships between hosts and migrant groups who are already present.

Completed components of the book from my dissertation (see working papers below) include: 

• An overtime analysis showing how Venezuelan migration to Chile improved citizens' attitudes about Peruvian migrants

• Two conjoint experiments in Brazil showing improved attitudes toward Haitians in areas where Venezuelans arrived

• A re-analysis of two largescale (combined N = 38,000) survey experiments in Europe showing how citizens compare between migrant groups and update their preferences in real time

Future components of the book will include: 

• A test of how new migrant flows affect citizens' behavior toward other immigrants

• An evaluation of how sympathetically viewed migrant flows influence  perceptions and treatment of previously arrived immigrant groups

Altogether, the book shows that considering multiple immigrant flows reveals quickly improving relations between immigrants and hosts that politicians and scholars miss when they focus exclusively on reactions to new immigration. 

Recent approaches to the study of intergroup relations have proposed that in-group members form evaluations of specific outgroups relative to other social groups in their environment. This article extends this approach to the study of immigration attitudes and builds a theory of how such reference frame effects allow for host citizens to positively update their opinions of particular immigrant groups when other, more disliked immigrant groups are salient in their environment. I test this theory by developing a new causally-identified paradigm for testing reference frame effects, and apply this technique to two largescale conjoint experiments which collectively survey over 38,000 citizens in 16 countries about their immigration preferences. I show that host citizens' evaluations of immigrant groups are strongly influenced by the reference frames generated by previous tasks, and that citizens particularly improve their evaluations of well-liked groups like Christian migrants and Ukrainians after having evaluated disliked alternatives.

What leads host citizens to prefer one migrant group over another, and what causes these preferences to vary from place to place? I argue that citizens form preferences for immigrant groups by comparing between salient migrant groups that are present in their environment. Using controlled case comparisons and two original conjoint experiments fielded in Brazil, I show that Brazilians exhibit clear preferences for and against migrants of different nationalities, but which group is preferred changes from place to place. In particular, citizens show a marked preference for Haitian arrivals and against Venezuelan arrivals only in areas where Haitians are present and many recent Venezuelan migrants have arrived. This pattern reverses that of other areas in Brazil and indicates that preferences are shaped as much or more by the local presence or absence of groups than by those groups' own size or racial and cultural characteristics. 

Is empathetic media effective in shifting readers’ attitudes toward refugee policies? We present the results of two survey experiments conducted in the United Kingdom that presented respondents with empathetic news articles about refugees. We find that empathetic appeals induce empathy in media consumers and encourage slightly more open attitudes toward refugee admission, but not for individuals with strong preexisting prejudice against refugees. Survey respondents are also more willing to engage in political action in favor of refugees. These effects hold regardless of the portrayed refugees' national or religious background. 

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Over the last decade, a popular experimental method—the conjoint design—has been used widely by political scientists to understand how immigrant characteristics shape individual attitudes toward them. We collect replication files for all studies consisting of conjoint experiments where respondents are asked to evaluate hypothetical immigrant profiles with attributes varying along economic (e.g., educational attainment and occupation) and cultural (e.g., nationality and religion) dimensions. We meta-analyze their estimates to assess the relative effect of each set of attributes on evaluations of immigrants. Our results confirm prior findings suggesting that preferences are driven by both sociotropic economic considerations and cultural or norms-based concerns.