# **3 Theoretical Motivation**

Gordon Allport’s (1954) book The Nature of Prejudice outlined ‘contact theory’, which has – subsequently become one of the most influential theories in the social sciences applied across sociology, political science, and economics. It suggests that, under certain conditions, inter-group contact can reduce prejudice between majority and minority groups. The conditions he identified include socio-economic equality, shared norms, cooperation, and institutional support. The ideas have been widely applied to examine attitudes and prejudice relating to, for example, race, sexual orientation, religion, and immigration.

The evidence on the impact of inter-group contact on receiving community attitudes to immigrants is mixed (Paluck et al. 2019). On the one hand, for example, Quillian (1996)’s finding of a positive relationship between inter-group interaction and white racial attitudes towards African-Americans has been widely cited across the immigration literature. On the other hand, for example, Hopkins (2010) examines panel data on US public attitudes to immigration to explore a ‘politicized places hypothesis’, finding that when faced with a large influx, local communities adopt negative attitudes, albeit only when the influx is combined with destabilising local demographics and salient political rhetoric at the national level.

Relatedly, there is a broader literature that examines the correlates of ‘native’ attitudes to immigration. This literature tries to explain attitudes, policy preferences, and voting preferences, usually focusing on European or North-American contexts. Its main methodological challenge has generally been to identify causal relationships in the absence of panel data sets or experimental methods. This literature identifies two main sets of explanations underlying ‘native’– i.e. host community – attitudes (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014). First, economic explanations. From this perspective, host communities are concerned with the effects of immigration on labour market competition i.e. increased supply of low-skilled workers leads to a decrease in wages (Mayda 2006) or the fiscal implications i.e. immigrants pay less taxes and claim more benefits (Dustmann and Preston 2007). However, empirical evidence for these hypotheses is limited. In terms of the labour market competition hypothesis, opposition to immigrants is not focused on immigrants with similar skills to the host community. In terms of the fiscal burden hypothesis, higher income people are no more likely to oppose low-skilled labour (Hainmueller and Hiscox 2007). Second, cultural explanations. From this perspective, ‘natives’ are more likely to favour immigrants with common identities such as nationality, ethnicity, and race (Sniderman et al. 2004; Ford 2011). However, the mechanisms that underlie this have often been hard to identify. There is a consensus – in the literature that what matters is the ‘sociotropic’ role of culture i.e. perceptions of difference, and that the relationship between cultural difference and exclusionary attitudes is not inevitable but contingent upon contextual mediating factors such as the media and elite discourse (Hopkins 2010; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014).

How has this literature been applied to refugees and forced migration? There is a burgeoning literature on the impact of forced displacement on host communities, much of which 8