Partisanship and perceived threats about immigration

What types of fears does immigration trigger in individuals and how do these fears differ across partisan lines? Prior research explores this question indirectly by linking immigration attitudes to respondents' demographics or to different threat frames. This research note offers a more direct test by designing a randomized experiment on a nationally representative sample of US citizens. I provide one half of the respondents with neutral information about immigration, while the other half serves as the control group. I find that respondents for whom the immigration issue is made salient (i.e. the treatment group) are more fearful of both their personal as well as national economic situation and about crime in their community than respondents in the control group. I further find that the overall effects are mainly driven by those respondents who self-identify as Republicans.