Residential Location and Attitudes toward Immigration in Great Britain: Compositional or Contextual Effects?

Across national contexts, residents of ethnically diverse areas tend to be more supportive toward immigration. Yet the mechanism behind this trend is not fully understood. Do immigrant attitudes impact residential location or does residential location impact immigrant attitudes? In this paper we draw on panel data from the British Election Study to assess the extent to which the correlation between attitudes towards immigration and ethnic diversity is driven by residential sorting or contextual effects. First, to test residential sorting, we explore how patterns of mobility into and out of residential areas based on levels of ethnic diversity relate to prior attitudes towards immigration. Second, to test contextual effects, we run panel models to identify whether residential location influences tolerance towards immigration, net of individual unobservables. The findings suggest that while attitudes towards immigration have no impact on the likelihood of moving out of ethnically diverse areas, they do shape the likelihood of moving into such areas. Respondents with higher tolerance are more likely to enter areas with high ethnic diversity, in line with residential sorting. In contrast, we find little evidence that residential location exerts an effect on attitudes towards immigration.