In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR author Andreas Wimmer about his open access article “Geo-Political Rivalry and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: A Conjoint Experiment in 22 Countries”, co-authored with Bart Bonikowski, Charles Crabtree, Zheng Fu, Matthew Golder, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

APSR: We’d like to start by asking about the inspiration behind this project. What motivated you to focus on an international relations perspective within the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes?

Andreas Wimmer: I was always wondering why such a perspective was missing in dealing with this topic. My first paper on anti-immigrant sentiment dates back 20 years or so and I have followed this literature since then. It seemed such an obvious angle to me: Aren’t people judging other people by their country of origin and its policies all the time, including its foreign relations? There are also plenty of historical examples: German immigrants and their descendants in the USA became hugely unpopular during and after World War I, Japanese after Pearl Harbor. I had worked with a related, but more historically accented argument—that a history of violent conflict leaves a legacy of anti-immigrant sentiment—in a previous article (published in Social Forces with Wesley Hiers and Thomas Soehl). When the opportunity emerged, I was eager to give this argument a contemporary and experimental twist and test it at the individual level.

APSR: How did this co-authorship come about?

Andreas Wimmer: A Columbia sociology graduate student, Zheng Fu, and I were talking for a while about how to empirically assess the international relations perspective on anti-immigrant sentiment. We gradually pivoted to the idea of doing an experiment. Earlier on, I had been invited by Kiyoteru Tsutsui from Stanford to join a team of researchers studying populism, under the methodological guidance of Charles Crabtree from Dartmouth. Kiyo was getting funding from the Tokyo foundation to run a survey with experiments in countries around the world. We then tagged the immigrant officer experiment on to that survey and Bart Bonikowski, Charles Crabtree, and I hashed out the details of how to run this experiment. Most of the researchers on that populism team as well as Zheng Fu became co-authors of this paper. 

APSR: What was the most challenging/difficult part of the research process?

Andreas Wimmer: The main challenge was to find plausible countries of immigrant origin for all the 22 survey countries. We needed a pair of countries (a rival and an ally) from racially and culturally very dissimilar backgrounds from the point of view of the majority of respondents and another pair of very similar populations. This was needed in order not to confound racial preferences / racism and rivalry. As we detail in the paper, for some survey countries finding four such countries weren’t all that obvious.

APSR: In your paper, you mention the challenge of including countries of immigrant origin that were less clearly identifiable as rivals or allies. Could you elaborate on these challenges, cases that were particularly so, and how you addressed them?

Andreas Wimmer: The more difficult ones were countries that maintain a lower profile internationally and don’t engage in clear rivalries with other countries. The task to find racially/culturally dissimilar and similar pairs at the same time complicated things further. Greece-Turkey or US-China are easy, but who are the rivals of South Africa or Peru? I think we managed this task pretty well, overall; and we ran an additional survey to validate our assumptions of who is seen as allied and who is seen as a rival, which populations are seen as racially and culturally different or similar. Almost all the assumptions were confirmed in this additional survey that we ran in the 22 countries.

APSR: One of your key findings is the pronounced discrimination against immigrants from rival states. Were you surprised by the extent of this discrimination?

Andreas Wimmer: Not really, because I had of course put all the theoretical bets on this finding. Honestly, I was surprised that it was not the strongest of all predictors (the beauty of empirics: they tend to ignore our beliefs).

APSR: Were there any unexpected findings or patterns that emerged during your analysis that you found particularly intriguing?

Andreas Wimmer: There are some details I hadn’t anticipated. The strength of anti-Chinese sentiment in East Asia, for example. And most importantly, the massive popularity of Japanese immigrants all around the world (with two exceptions or so).

APSR: The timing of your survey, coinciding with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, provided a unique opportunity to study the effects of a geopolitical crisis on immigration attitudes. What were the most striking patterns you observed?

Andreas Wimmer: There is just such a clear, straightforward and linear pattern here, with Russians becoming less popular as immigrants every day after the invasion and Ukrainians more popular by the day, in line with the real-life welcome of Ukrainians in the West.

APSR: You mention in your paper that future work could include surveying Muslim, non-white and non-Asian-majority countries. Could you elaborate more on this, and how you expect the theory will apply to these cases?

Andreas Wimmer: Our results show very clearly that rivalry trumps race in the way people around the world evaluate immigrants. But it could be that anti-African or especially anti-Muslim sentiment is stronger than the rivalry effect. To test this possibility, we would have to survey majority non-Black and non-Muslim countries that maintain both clearcut rival and allied relationships with Muslim and majority-black countries. In general, and perhaps as always, a larger number of fictitious countries of immigrant origin and a larger sample of survey countries would be ideal, perhaps even a survey covering the entire world. Alternatively, one could vary religion and race at the individual level (for example with photos), though religious and racial variation is not plausible for many countries of origin that are also maintaining clear-cut rivalries and allyships.

APSR: Are there any policy implications that you think should be drawn from your findings, especially for countries grappling with immigration?

Andreas Wimmer: The logical policy implications are not very useful, I am afraid: If you want to have less anti-immigrant sentiment, countries should try to recruit immigrants from allies and curb immigration from rival countries. This is actually happening in many places around the world (including in the USA), but I am not sure I would endorse this from an ethical point of view: After all, many people disagree with their governments on foreign policy issues and thus should perhaps not be penalized by the stereotypical association with their country of origin’s foreign policy. The other policy suggestion would be to have fewer rivalries or solve existing ones if you would like to have less anti-immigrant sentiment. I doubt that many foreign policy makers and heads of state would set their priorities in this way.

APSR: Is there anything else you would like to say about this paper?

Andreas Wimmer: I’d like to thank my numerous co-authors on this paper, it was a great experience working with them. I learned a lot especially from the experimentalists on the team.

– Andreas Wimmer, Columbia University