Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in Canada: Decreased Support and Increased Political Polarization

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University or the views of Utah State University. [...] First, we update the trends in the evolution of ATI in Canada and to the best of our knowledge are the first to document that negative ATI (i.e., the proportion of Canadians who prefer fewer immigrants) have significantly increased since 2008.1 Second, our study is the first to examine the impact of a wide range of economic, sociopsychological, and political or ideological factors in shaping ATI. [...] Given Canada’s status as the second-largest country globally and one of the most decentralized federations, the considerable size and diversity of provinces—often characterized as “small worlds” in the literature (Bilodeau, Turgeon, and Karakoç 2012)—make the provinces a fertile ground for gauging context effects in Canada. [...] The first column reports the calculated conditional marginal effect of each variable on the probability of favoring “fewer immigrants.” The second column reports the results for the probability of favoring “more immigrants.” Moreover, for each set of variables, the first row reports the conditional predicted probability (of supporting fewer or more immigrants) for the reference category. [...] The remaining rows report the difference in the predicted probability for each given category relative to the reference category.23 This approach allows us to compare the estimated differences with a base probability, providing a perspective on the magnitude of the effects.