http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/200 ... n_see.html
Good article by Arnold Kling:
Survey USA ran a neat survey about immigration late last year. They asked people in all 50 states:
Which of these 2 statements do you agree with more:
One: Immigrants take jobs away from Americans.
Two: Immigrants do jobs that Americans don't want.
One of the main findings took me off guard. I naturally assumed that states with a lot of immigrants would be anti-immigrant. After all, whenever I visit L.A., the complaints about immigration never stop. But it looks like I'm smack in the middle of a biased sample of elderly Angelenos. On average, high-immigration states like California are unusually PRO-immigrant.
To get a little more quantitative, let us define the Immigration Optimism Score to equal the % who gave answer #2 minus the % who gave answer #1. Then regress this Optimism Score on Immigrants as a % of the Population. The result: An extra percentage-point of immigrants increases the Immigration Optimism Score by 1.7 points. That's a lot, and you don't need fancy statistics to see it:
Table 1: Immigration Optimism Score as f(Immigrants/Population)
The simplest interpretation of this result is that people who rarely see an immigrant can easily scapegoat them for everything wrong in the world. Personal experience doesn't get in the way of fantasy. But people who actually see immigrants have trouble escaping the fact that immigrants do hard, dirty jobs that few Americans want - at a realistic wage, anyway.
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