Preferences of Immigrants on Immigration: Convergence or Persistence? Evidence from the European Social Survey

This article studies the immigrants’ attitude towards immigration with special emphasis on the transition from the first to the second and the 1.5 generations. We use European Social Survey (ESS) data for the 2002-2020 period, which include many questions that allowed us to estimate the preferences of immigrants on economic, social and cultural consequences of immigration. As general evidence, we find that immigrants of all the considered generations show more favor to immigration than natives. Besides, our results reveal that the gap with the natives shows a remarkable degree of persistence through generations for many of the indicators we analyzed. We also observe that the opinions of individuals who immigrated during childhood (generation 1.5) look not different from second-generation immigrants. For what concerns the main determinants of the support of immigrants for immigration, our results suggest that citizenship and age have a negative impact, whereas religiosity, education level and the feeling of being discriminated have a positive one. These results are generally consistent with the previous literature. Finally, ESS data allowed us to investigate an effect of intergenerational ongoing migration. We considered migrants born to fathers who were first generation migrants. These individuals are second generation in the origin country, and first generation in the destination country. Their favor for further inflows of migrants is still higher compared to the natives of destination countries, but lower compared to migrants of the same origin who were not born to immigrant fathers.