Why do some individuals fear immigration more than others? The role of preferences and ancestral characteristics

This paper presents a novel approach to assessing the importance of preferences in shaping individual opinions about immigration. We rely on the emerging literature dealing with deep historical roots of preference formation, and control for a set of initial conditions experienced by ancestral populations that might have in uenced the evolution of individual-speci c traits. In addition, we explore the roots of preference variation embodied in the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and control for linguistic and genetic distances between populations. By considering a sub-population of native individuals with one or both foreign-born parents (i.e., second-generation immigrants), we find that parental ancestral characteristics significantly correlate with the current attitudes toward immigration. In particular, historical and linguistic factors associated with higher risk aversion and weaker long-term orientation translate into a stronger concern for the economic consequences of immigration and the admission of poorer immigrants from outside Europe which are considered as closer substitutes for local labor market opportunities, especially among medium and low skilled workers. Risk aversion, on the other hand, has a negligible effect on cultural concerns of immigration. This evidence is robust to alternative defnitions of second-generation immigrants and a rich set of geographical and regional fixed effect controls.