Et studie af holdningen til indvandrere i Danmark

The question of immigration has been on the political agenda for decades and several studies have examined immigration attitudes in Denmark. However, the question of preferences for specific immigrants and the influence of economic and cultural characteristics have not yet been subject to systematic scrutiny. As the first of its kind in a Danish setting, this study aims to remedy this lacuna.

Drawing on a pre-registered conjoint experiment with an embedded priming experiment, we document the preferences of a representative sample of Danish citizens on which immigrants they support for admission. This approach allows us to test the effect on preferences of seven immigrant attributes simultaneously. We show that Danes prefer educated immigrants from Western countries with high-status jobs. In the same vein, we find evidence of a homogeneous Muslim penalty across all countries of origin and a low level of favorability towards immigrants from the Middle East and Somalia in particular. Through the embedded priming experiment, we show that these preferences are suprisingly robust across experimental conditions where we randomly vary whether immigrants are presented as a economic or cultural threat.

Furthermore, we discuss if our results indicate signs of discrimination against certain immigrant groups. Although, we find evidence of higher levels of bias towards Muslims and immigrants from Somalia by Danes who feel more threatened by immigrants as a whole, we argue that our experiment does not provide any sufficient tests of discimination. Thus, our results should be interpreted as prioritization or simple preferences for whom to admit into Denmark.