metadata: authors: 0: author: Schotte,Simone Raphaela
1: author: Winkler,Hernan Jorge
count: World
docna: 0: docna: Why are the elderly more averse to
            immigration when they are more likely to benefit ? evidence
            across countries
docty: Policy Research Working Paper
subtopic: Indigenous Peoples,Indigenous Peoples Law,Human Migrations & Resettlements,Labor Markets,Educational Sciences,Adolescent Health,International Migration,Indigenous Communities,Rural Labor Markets,Migration and Development
teratopic: Health, Nutrition and Population,Gender,Science and Technology Development,Education
abstracts: cdata!: Using household surveys for 24 countries
            over a 10-year period, this paper investigates why the
            elderly are more averse to open immigration policies than
            their younger peers. The analysis finds that the negative
            correlation between age and pro-immigration attitudes is
            mostly explained by a cohort or generational change.  In
            fact, once controlling for year of birth, the correlation
            between age and pro-immigration attitudes is either positive
            or zero in most of the countries in the sample. Under
            certain assumptions, the estimates suggest that aging
            societies will tend to become less averse to open
            immigration regimes over time.
repnme: repnme: Why are the elderly more averse to
            immigration when they are more likely to benefit ? evidence
            across countries
display_title: Why are the elderly more averse to
            immigration when they are more likely to benefit evidence
            across countries
listing_relative_url: /research/2016/02/25861531/elderly-more-averse-immigration-more-likely-benefit-evidence-across-countries
topicv3: Labor Markets m1326488 855,Indigenous Peoples m1326947 749,Education m1327048 470,Immigration m1504162 2837,Aging m1504792 3491
publishtoextweb_dt: 2016-02-02T00:00:00Z
historic_topic: Health, Nutrition and Population,Gender,Science and Technology Development,Education
no_of_pages: 34
author_keys: 0: author_key: 1302266
model_extractions: WPS7554 Policy Research Working Paper 7554 Why Are the Elderly More Averse to Immigration When They Are More Likely to Benefit?

Evidence across Countries _Simone Schotte Hernan Winkler_ Europe and Central Asia Region Office of the Chief Economist February 2016
Policy Research Working Paper 7554

# **Abstract**

Using household surveys for 24 countries over a 10-year period, this paper investigates why the elderly are more averse to open immigration policies than their younger peers. The analysis finds that the negative correlation between age and pro-immigration attitudes is mostly explained by a cohort or generational change. In fact, once controlling for year of birth, the correlation between age and pro-immigration attitudes is either positive or zero in most of the countries in the sample. Under certain assumptions, the estimates suggest that aging societies will tend to become less averse to open immigration regimes over time.

This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Europe and Central Asia Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at hwinkler@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
# **WHY ARE THE ELDERLY MORE AVERSE TO IMMIGRATION WHEN THEY ARE MORE LIKELY TO**

# **BENEFIT? EVIDENCE ACROSS COUNTRIES**

Simone Schotte<sup>*</sup> and Hernan Winkler<sup>†</sup> JEL no. D70, J14, F22

> * University of Göttingen and GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

† The World Bank, Corresponding Author: hwinkler@worldbank.org.

The views reported in this paper are the authors’ own and do not necessary reflect those of the Organizations they are affiliated with or their member countries. We would like to thank the participants of the Aging conference organized by the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) and the World Bank and those of the 2015 European Public Choice Society meeting for valuable comments.Two anonymous referees also provided many useful comments.
# **1. Introduction**

Most developed economies are expected to experience dramatic demographic changes in the near future. While there are currently four working‐age individuals per elderly person in Europe, population projections show that this figure will shrink by half in 2050 (United Nations, 2012). Although the phenomenon of aging populations is affecting developed economies almost exclusively nowadays, developing countries will soon follow, as many of them are currently witnessing a decrease in fertility and mortality rates. There is an increasingly large body of literature analyzing the potential consequences of the aging process on economic growth, fiscal outcomes and the sustainability of pensions systems (European Commission, 2012). In the face of a shrinking working‐age population, measures to encourage the immigration of foreign workers could provide a promising policy option to help mitigate the aging process and its effects on the economy.

Even though the potential welfare gains from a more open immigration regime are enormous, most individuals tend to display high levels of opposition against increased immigration (see, for example, Facchini and Mayda, 2008; Card et al, 2012). In this context, the elderly represent one of the demographic groups with the highest levels of opposition to open immigration regimes in most countries (see Figure 1; also see Mayda, 2006; Card et al, 2012; O’Rourke and Sinnot, 2006). This stylized fact is striking, since the elderly tend to be out of the labor force and thereby less likely to experience the potential short‐term negative effects of immigration than working‐age individuals. Given that individual preferences play a decisive role in the policy 2
agenda, these empirical patterns raise concerns about the future of immigration policies in an aging world, as the elderly will represent an increasingly larger share of the voting population.

Despite these concerns, the relationship between age and attitudes toward immigrants observed in cross‐section surveys – even when controlling for other observable characteristics – cannot directly be interpreted as reflecting a change in attitudes over the life‐cycle. The old not only differ from the young in terms of age, but they were also born and raised in a different time, in a different economic and institutional context. In fact, the observed patterns could reflect different preferences across cohorts or generations. For instance, if older cohorts grew up in a context of lower levels of international immigration than their younger counterparts did, they could have very different perceptions about immigrants that may remain fixed throughout their lives.<sup>3</sup> Hence, the relationship between age and attitudes toward immigrants observed in a cross‐section could be driven by both an age effect – i.e. the fact that attitudes change with age – and by a cohort effect – i.e. the fact that attitudes are different across generations. If the cross‐sectional age patterns were fully explained by a cohort effect, the political support for more open immigration regimes could actually increase in the future as younger cohorts replace those who are more averse toward increased immigration. To our knowledge, this paper provides the first attempt to disentangle these effects for a large group of countries.

> 3 There is empirical evidence that life experiences at certain age levels can explain why some generations have different policy preferences than others. For example, Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2013) find that large macroeconomic shocks experienced during the critical years of adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 18 and 25, shape preferences for redistribution.

3
Economic theory suggests that individual attitudes would be stable over the life‐cycle or become more pro‐immigration since, for instance, older individuals are less likely to work and thereby less exposed to immigrants’ competition in the labor market. In contrast, most of the empirical literature on this subject finds that older individuals are more averse toward immigration than their younger peers (see, for instance, Mayda, 2006; Facchini and Mayda, 2009; Card et al, 2012; O’Rourke and Sinnot, 2006). Nevertheless, the _age effect_ regarding preferences on immigration reported in most empirical studies includes both a true age effect as well as a cohort effect. To our knowledge, the only paper that attempts to separate these effects is Calahorrano (2011). Using panel data for Germany between 1999 and 2008, she finds that immigration concerns decrease over the life‐cycle. At the same time, older cohorts are found to be more averse to immigration in Germany. Relative to other issues, immigration concerns are found to actually decrease over the life‐cycle. These results are in sharp contrast to those that come from a specification that does not control for year of birth.

To disentangle the age and cohort effects on attitudes toward immigrants, we use an approach similar to Calahorrano (2011). However, given the lack of comparable panel data surveys for a large group of countries, we use pooled cross‐sections from the European Social Survey (ESS) for the period 2002‐2012. Using these repeated cross‐sections, we track birth cohorts over 10 years, which allows disentangling the effects of age, cohort and time on attitudes toward migrants. We first confirm the stylized fact found in the literature that older individuals are more averse than their younger peers with regards to immigration. However, when controlling for birth cohort, our estimates become more consistent with the predictions of economic theory, as the estimated age effect becomes either positive or not statistically different from 4
zero for most countries. In only three of the 24 countries in our sample the age effect remains negative and significant.<sup>4</sup> This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 surveys the literature on attitudes toward immigration, in particular in relationship with natives’ age. Section 3 describes the data and the empirical strategy. Section 4 presents the estimated age and cohort effects by country, and section 5 investigates the determinants of cross‐country differences regarding the effect of age on pro‐immigration attitudes. Finally, section 6 concludes.

# **2. Attitudes toward Immigration over the Life‐Cycle**

Three main channels have been identified that may contribute to shape the attitudes of natives toward immigration. First, immigration can have an impact on the income distribution of the recipient economy through the labor market. On the one hand, native workers whose skills are very similar to those of immigrants’ tend to be concerned about the negative impact that higher immigration rates could have on their wages and unemployment risk. On the other hand, capital owners and workers whose skills are complements to those of immigrants are likely to benefit from a more open immigration regime. The effect of immigration on natives’ real incomes will operate not only through the labor market, but also through the market of

> 4 It is important to mention that while we refer to the coefficients associated with age and cohort as “effects”, we are not implying any causality but instead following the standard terminology used in cohort studies such as Deaton and Paxson (1997) and Calahorrano (2013).

5
goods and services. If immigration reduces low‐skilled wages, this will tend to decrease the prices of unskilled‐intensive goods and services, thereby raising the welfare of consumers (Cortes, 2006).

Second, preferences on immigration may also be shaped by perceptions regarding the impact of immigrants on fiscal outcomes. Facchini and Mayda (2009) find evidence consistent with the _tax‐adjustment_ model, where following an inflow of unskilled workers that may demand social assistance, tax rates would be increased to balance the government’s budget. In this case, high income individuals are more negatively affected by unskilled immigration than low‐income individuals as they bear most of the additional cost to the welfare system. However, they are more positively affected than low income individuals by skilled immigration.

Finally, attitudes toward immigrants may also be affected by other factors such as opposition to different social norms and customs, as well as ethnic prejudice. Card et al (2012) use the ESS to measure the relative importance of economic and compositional concerns – which are crucial to understand discrimination toward immigrants – in driving opinions about immigration policy. While they find that concerns over the effect of immigration on wages and taxes are important, differences in compositional concerns explain most of the variation in attitudes toward immigration across different native demographic groups.

These three channels have implications regarding the relationship between the age of an individual and his or her position regarding immigration. Given that older individuals are more likely to be out of the labor force – and thereby less concerned about the impact of immigrants on the labor market – and to have more savings than their younger counterparts – and thereby 6
benefit from the increasing returns to capital brought about by immigration – they would have more incentives to support a more open immigration regime than their younger peers. At the same time, the impact of immigration on prices of goods and services intensive in migrants’ work may also affect the attitudes toward immigration over the life‐cycle depending on the consumption patterns of these goods and services by age. Finally, if young and old workers are complementary factors of production, then even old individuals who are still in the labor force may still benefit from immigration since migrants tend to be younger. In fact, there is evidence that establishments with mixed age teams have not only a higher productivity of older workers but also of young employees, suggesting that they are complementary factors of production (Gobel and Zwick, 2013). Accordingly, Gang and Batiz (1994) find that both in the United States and Europe, an inflow of unskilled immigrants tend to raise the returns to experience in the host country. Peri and Sparber (2009) find that foreign‐born workers in the United States specialize in occupations intensive in manual‐physical labor skills which could be complementary to tasks of older individuals, as they would be less likely to have physically demanding jobs.

If individuals are less open to immigration because of compositional concerns, the relationship between attitudes toward immigration and age would depend on whether those preferences are age‐invariant or evolve over the life‐cycle. Theories and research in the fields of sociology and psychology show that political attitudes and opinions are shaped during youth and tend to remain stable over the life‐cycle (Alwin and Krosnick, 1991). In particular, the _impressionable‐ years hypothesis_ sustains that attitudes become more stable immediately following early adulthood, and remain stable throughout the remainder of the life‐cycle. Since compositional 7
concerns regarding immigration are not driven by purely economic factors that may change over time, they would be likely to remain stable during the life‐cycle. The empirical finding that most of the age gap in attitudes toward immigration is driven by compositional rather than by labor market concerns (Card et al, 2012) would suggest that the more negative attitudes of the elderly toward immigration rather tend to be the result of differences across cohorts rather than a life‐cycle pattern.

Finally, while perceptions regarding the impact of immigration on fiscal outcomes have predictions for the link between attitudes toward immigration and individual income, they do not necessarily have implications for the evolution of these attitudes over the life‐cycle once we control for changes in levels and composition of income. However, there is large body of literature on how the impact of immigration on the sustainability of pension systems may shape attitudes toward immigration over the life‐cycle. In an aging economy with a pay‐as‐you‐go pension scheme (PAYG), immigration may affect the fiscal sustainability of the system and thereby the attitudes of natives toward a more open immigration regime through this channel (Casarico and Devillanova, 2003).

Different settings of the PAYG system would have different implications for the evolution of attitudes toward immigration over the life‐cycle. In a PAYG system with a _fixed benefit_ , the elderly would tend to be more pro‐immigration than younger individuals because they would still benefit from the increasing capital returns and decreasing prices of certain goods and services associated with immigration. However, even though young workers would be negatively affected by a decrease in wages, they would benefit from a declining social security 8
contribution rate today and from immigrant’s descendants contributing to their pension benefits in the future (Sand and Razin, 2007). Thereby, the old’s and young’s preferences are closer together under this scenario than in one without a PAYG system (Calahorrano, 2013).

In a PAYG system where pension levels follow a wage growth index _,_ older individuals will vote for a more restrictive immigration regime if they perceive that immigration will decrease wages (Haupt and Peters, 1998; Scholten and Thum, 1996). In other words, both retired and working‐ age individuals would be affected by the impact of immigration on wages. On the other hand, young workers would also benefit from a lower social security contribution rate. Thereby, the age gap in preferences toward immigration would also be smaller in this case than in a scenario without a PAYG system. Razin and Sadka (1999) argue that assuming perfect capital mobility and forward looking individuals, the age gap in preferences would also be smaller in a PAYG system with fixed contributions and flexible pension benefits than in an economy without a pension system.

In summary, while the labor market channel predicts that older individuals should be less averse to immigration than their younger counterparts, under a PAYG system the preferences regarding immigration across age groups should be more similar. However, this prediction depends on the assumption that immigrant workers are integrated to the formal labor market. If they are not, then young individuals would experience the negative short term effects of decreased wages without any benefits in terms of reduced contributions. In such a case, even under a PAYG system younger individuals would be more averse toward immigration than their older peers.

9
# **3. Data and Methodology**

Ideally, to determine how perceptions change over the life‐cycle, we would like to follow individuals over time. However, long‐running panels are rare in both developed and developing countries. In order to identify age patterns using repeated cross‐section data, Deaton and Paxson (1994) and Deaton (1997) suggest an identification strategy that instead of tracking individuals follows the evolution of cohort averages over time. The procedure consists in dividing the individuals in the sample in cells defined by time‐invariant characteristics such as year of birth and averaging the variable of interest over individuals belonging to each cell; then, the authors estimate a linear model using the variable of interest as a dependent variable, and cohort, age and year dummy variables as independent variables. Since we want to control for certain individual characteristics that change over the life‐cycle and are likely to affect the degree of pro‐immigration attitudes, we estimate the models using stacked micro‐data from the cross‐section surveys instead of averaging over time‐invariant characteristics. As a robustness check, we also construct a birth cohort panel and estimate the model using the standard decomposition approach as suggested by Deaton (1997) and the results are very similar to the ones reported in the paper.

To identify the effect of age on attitudes toward migration, we append household surveys from multiple years and estimate the following Probit model separately for each country: 10
where �� is a dummy variable equal to one if individual _i_ exhibits pro‐immigrant attitudes, and zero otherwise; _AGE_ and _COHORT_ are dummy variables representing the individuals’ age and cohort, respectively, and _YEAR_ is a year dummy variable. The cohort or year‐of‐birth dummy variables are introduced in five‐year intervals in order to avoid losing more degrees of freedom. Regarding the age and cohort effects, we estimate three alternative specifications using age and cohort dummy variables, a 5‐degree polynomial and a linear function.

There is a large literature regarding the identification of age, cohort and year effects (see Schulhofer‐Wohl (2013) and McKenzie (2006)). A well‐known challenge in this literature is that such effects cannot be identified without making specific assumptions, since they are perfectly collinear. We follow Deaton and Paxson (1994) and implement their normalization of the year effects by assuming that trends are only captured by cohort effects, so that the year effects are orthogonal to a time trend.

The set of variables _x_ contains individual characteristics such as gender, income, education, employment status and other public benefits. The results presented in the next section do not control for whether the respondent is a pensioner or not, as we want to capture the effects of pensions, savings returns and labor market outcomes on individual attitudes through an individual’s age. The main reason for this decision is that we would expect that attitudes toward migration would not change in a discrete step as the person starts receiving pensions but rather change slowly during the life‐cycle as the person approaches retirement (Haupt and 11
Peters (1998) explicitly consider this issue in their model of immigration and public pensions). In particular, if individuals are forward looking, we would expect that as they approach retirement they would gradually weight more heavily the positive effects of immigration on capital returns than its negative effects on the labor market even if they are in the labor force. As a robustness check, we also estimate a specification to test if the age patterns change when controlling for pensioner status, but our main findings were not affected.<sup>5</sup> The data for this paper come from the European Social Survey (ESS) for the survey years 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012. The survey contains about 1,500 to 2,500 individual observations per country/year. The ESS covers 36 countries, 24 of which are included in our analysis since only those were surveyed in at least four years and thereby allow to observe at least two cohorts with the same age, a requirement to disentangle cohort and age effects. We exclude non‐citizens from the sample, since we want to capture the preferences of potential voters.

Card et al (2012) investigates the drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in Europe using, among others, the following variables of the ESS:

1. To what extent do you think [this country] should allow people of the _same race or ethnic group_ as most people to come and live here?

> 5 The results are available from the authors upon request.

12
2. To what extent do you think [this country] should allow people of a _different race or_ _ethnic group_ from most people to come and live here?

Where the possible answers to each question are:

- a) Allow many to come and live here;

- b) Allow some;

- c) Allow a few;

- d) Allow none;

- e) Don’t know.

These questions may not be strictly comparable across countries, as the answers could be affected by a host of other factors such as the current stock and composition of immigrants in each country. However, while we are aware of this limitation, the ESS has been extensively used in papers studying the determinants of attitudes towards immigration across countries (see, for instance, Card et al (2012) and Facchini and Mayda (2009)). Moreover, Card et al (2012) mentions that these questions in the ESS eliminate ambiguities by referring to _people_ _who come to live in a country_ , rather than to _immigrants_ . In countries where citizenship is based on blood ancestry such as Germany, a translation of immigrants would include people who were born in the country but are not citizens.

13
We then create two alternative measures of pro‐immigration attitudes. The first variable ( _proimmigsame_ ) is equal to 1 if the individual would like many or some immigrants of the same race or ethnic group as the majority, and 0 otherwise (that is, if the individual would like few immigrants or none from the same race or ethnic group). The second variable ( _proimmigdiff_ ) is constructed following the same criteria used for _proimmigsame_ but it refers to immigrants of a different race or ethnic group from most people in the country. While _proimmigsame_ is less likely to capture compositional concerns regarding immigration and more likely to capture purely economic concerns, _proimmigdiff_ is more likely to capture a mix of both concerns regarding immigration (see Table 1). Since we find the same patterns using either _proimmigsame_ or _proimmigdiff_ , we report the results using _proimmigdiff_ only as the dependent variable. Figures reporting the results for _proimmigsame_ variable can be found in the Appendix.

# **4. Age and Cohort Effects in Attitudes toward Immigration: Estimation Results**

Figure 2 shows the estimated marginal effects of age from equation (1) using the dependent variable _proimmigdiff_ and two specifications – both excluding the set of individual controls, �� . The first one only includes age and survey year as explanatory variables (red line); we call this specification “cross‐sectional” as it captures the age patterns that typically emerge from cross‐ section survey data. The second specification incorporates age, year of birth and survey year dummy variables as explanatory variables (blue line). According to the model without any cohort controls, older people are less likely to exhibit positive attitudes toward immigrants than their younger peers in almost all countries considered. For instance, an 80‐year‐old individual in Poland is about 50 percent less likely to report positive attitudes toward immigrants than an 14
individual 20 years old or younger. Nevertheless, this stylized relationship becomes weaker when controlling for cohort effects. The blue lines show the effect of age on attitudes toward immigrants that is not affected by a generational change. When controlling for year of birth, the age effects completely reverse in 11 countries – the most dramatic changes are observed in Germany, Netherlands, Estonia and Poland – showing that in those economies the more negative attitudes of older individuals toward immigrants are primarily driven by a generational change. In other words, these results imply that in these countries within each cohort the attitudes toward immigrants are expected to become more positive over the life‐cycle. For instance, in the case of Poland, the age effect implies that when an individual reaches age 80, he will be about 30 percent more likely to display positive attitudes toward immigrants than when he was 20 year old. In contrast, the age effects become more negative when we control for cohort of birth in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Israel and Slovakia. In other words, the more negative attitudes of the elderly towards immigrants among these countries seem to be driven by natives becoming more averse to immigrants throughout the life cycle.

Figure 3 displays the estimated cohort effects and shows that the generational change in the attitudes toward immigrants was significant among most of these economies, with younger cohorts being more welcoming of immigrants than their older counterparts in all countries except the Czech Republic, Ireland, Israel, Slovakia, Greece and the United Kingdom. This finding is consistent with previous evidence that the more negative attitudes of the elderly toward immigrants are driven by compositional concerns instead of economic ones (Card et al, 2012), as policy attitudes are shaped during youth and remain stable thereafter (Alwin and Krosnick, 1991). This result also implies that over time, older cohorts will be replaced by new 15
generations with a more positive perception of immigration in most of the countries in our sample.

The finding that attitudes toward immigration by age are largely unaffected by the race and ethnicity of migrants is puzzling. The implications of both the empirical and theoretical literature of the political economy of immigration reforms outlined above suggest that the more positive attitudes of older individuals would mostly be driven by economic factors – which would be better reflected by the attitudes toward immigrants of the same race or ethnicity ‐ rather than by lower levels of ethnic and racial prejudice –which are unlikely to vary with age. Our findings could reflect the fact that the prejudice of natives against immigrants is not as much related to their ethnic background so as to other socio‐economic characteristics.

Figure 4 shows the estimated non‐parametric age effects from equation (1) with and without controlling for other individual socio‐economic characteristics such as education, income and gender. In general, including such control variables does not change significantly the patterns that emerge from the estimated age effects. In other words, the empirical results are driven by aging itself and not by other individual characteristics that may vary or not over the life‐cycle. Some exceptions include Ireland and Slovakia – where the age patterns become less steep – as well as Switzerland and Bulgaria.

In order to investigate the statistical significance of our results, Table 2 shows the coefficients and standard errors estimated using a Probit model with both age and cohort of birth in linear form, and controlling for individual and household characteristics _X_ . These results confirm the above conclusions: regardless of the racial or ethnic composition of immigrants, older 16
individuals across most economies are more averse to immigration. Table 2 also shows that this stylized fact is driven by a cohort effect. When controlling for year of birth, the effect of age on attitudes toward immigration becomes statistically insignificant or positive in most countries considered, and this is independent of the ethnicity or race of the immigrants. The fact that the coefficient associated with the year of birth is positive and statistically significant in many countries confirms the fact that the negative correlation between age and pro‐immigration attitudes is driven mostly by older cohorts being more averse to immigration. It is important to keep in mind the caveat that these estimates might be affected by _attenuation_ bias. However, since most countries in the sample are developed or middle income economies, age and cohort are likely to be reported precisely in the survey.

# **5. Robustness Checks**

This section explores the robustness of the main results under two different scenarios. First, we test if the results are affected by the specification of the trend component. Second, we examine whether the results could be driven by the short time span considered (10 years).

# _Are age effects capturing trends?_

As mentioned above, we use the normalization proposed by Deaton and Paxson (1994) to the trend so that it captures a cyclical component of attitudes. However, as mentioned by Deaton (1997), this procedure is dangerous when there are a few surveys, as it is difficult to separate trends from transitory components. We estimate a specification that excludes the transformed dummy variables – and does not include conventional year dummy variables either ‐ to 17
investigate whether the cyclical component is an important driver of the results. The results in Figure 5 show that the age profile is basically unaffected when we dropped the cyclical component, in other words, the way the cyclical component is introduced in the model does not seem to be driving the results.

_Is the period of time long enough to capture life cycle effects?_ It could be argued that the period of time covered by the ESS – from 2002 to 2012 – may not be long enough to capture life cycle patterns. Preferences may change over a longer period of time, and 10 years cannot cover the same group of individuals from, for instance, age 20 to age 40. Our results rely on an assumption – common in this literature ‐ that the age profiles of different cohorts are the same. To test the robustness of this assumption, we need repeated cross‐sections covering a period of time longer than 10 years. To our knowledge, the only data set that satisfies this requirement is the World Value Survey (WVS) spanning the years from 1990 to 2011, that is, a period covering about 20 years. Unfortunately, the questions included in the WVS regarding immigrants are quite different from those of the ESS. Moreover, they are not available for all years, so we end up with only two countries from the Europe area: Spain (1990, 1995, 2000, 2007 and 2011) and Turkey (1990, 1996, 2001, 2007 and 2011).

The only question included in the WVS related to attitudes towards immigrants – and available for a sufficient number of survey years ‐ is: _On this list are various groups of people. Could you please mention any that you would not like to have as neighbors?_ The non‐mutually exclusive list of people includes immigrants/ foreign workers as well as drug addicts, people of a different race and heavy drinkers among others. We use this question to test the assumption that the 18
age profiles of different cohorts are very similar. We estimate equation (1) for three different subperiods (1990, 1995/1996, and 2000/2001; 1995/1996, 2000/2001, and 2007; 2000/2001, 2007 and 2011) and compare the estimated age profiles with those that emerge from using all 5 surveys covering 20 years. As mentioned above, the procedure to model year effects is problematic when the number of cross‐sections is too small. In this case, since we have only 3 cross‐sections for the 10‐year panels, we model the year effects using simple year dummy variables and we introduce age and cohort in a linear way.

Figure 6 shows the estimated marginal effects of age and cohort for the four subsamples of Spain and Turkey, as well as their 95 percent confidence intervals. The effects have the same sign across sub‐periods for each country, and their confidence intervals overlap. Figure 7 shows the estimated effects of age and age squared, even though the effects are slightly different across years, their confidence intervals overlap. Unfortunately, in most cases the effects are not statistically different from zero but, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, the goal of this robustness check was to test that the effects do not dramatically differ by using a 10‐year pseudo panel instead of a longer time span. The results suggest that the assumption that the age profiles of different cohorts are roughly similar seem to hold in this data set.

# **6. Conclusions**

Using household surveys for 24 countries between 2002 and 2012, we find that in most economies, older individuals are more averse toward immigrants because of a cohort or generational effect, not because they become more critical toward open immigration policies over the life‐cycle. Our preferred set of results in Figure 4 shows that in most countries pro‐ 19
immigration attitudes are either flat or increasing with an individual’s age. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to provide empirical evidence for a large number of countries consistent with the predictions of models of the political economy regarding attitudes toward immigration policies by age. At the same time, the finding that immigration attitudes are mostly driven by a cohort effect, with older birth cohorts showing higher levels of opposition toward immigration, is at a first glance consistent with existing evidence showing that the more negative attitudes of the elderly are largely explained by racial or ethnic prejudice – or compositional amenities – than by labor market concerns (Card et al, 2012). Nevertheless, we also find that older cohorts are more averse to immigrants from their same race or ethnic origin, suggesting that the attitudes of older cohorts against immigrants is not as much related to the ethnicity or race of immigrants so as to other immigrants’ characteristics.

The estimated age and cohort profiles may have implications for the political economy of immigration reforms in aging economies. If these profiles remain stable in the future, the fact that the new cohorts will replace their older and more averse to immigration counterparts may result in an increased overall support for more open immigration regimes over time.

Accordingly, aging economies where individuals become less averse to immigration throughout the life cycle may also improve their overall attitudes towards immigrants as the elderly will represent a larger fraction of the voting population. Nevertheless, as it is the case with any extrapolation of current trends to the future, caution is needed as policy preferences can change in response to many economic and political events over time. Finally, the estimated age and cohort profiles reveal significant heterogeneity across countries. An investigation of the drivers of such differences represents an important direction for future research.

20