Public support for immigration restriction in the United Kingdom: resource scarcity, ethnicity or poor origins?

Summary

Research on anti-immigrant attitudes in the United Kingdom in the past
has focused primarily on feelings of prejudice driven
by local concentrations of ethnic minorities. The
immigration debate, however, has arguably changed since the EU
expansions
and the economic crisis of the past decade. This
paper tests whether public support for immigration restriction is
empirically
driven by factors such as resource scarcity and
economic stagnation, skill supply of native and immigrant workers, and
the
origin of immigrants from poorer countries within
and outside the EU. Survey data from the European Social Survey between
2002 and 2010 are matched with regional level
indicators calculated using the UK Labour Force Surveys. Findings
suggest that
support for immigration restriction is higher in
regions where more immigrants are unemployed, but lower in regions where
more natives are unemployed for longer than a year.
Both the origin and ethnicity of the immigrant population appear to
play
a role in immigration policy preferences among
native respondents.