2.1 Understanding the cultural threat hypothesis

Political economists have long theorized that some form of material self-interest underpins anti-immigrant sentiment. Immigrants may threaten natives by competing for jobs, depressing wages, or dissipating welfare benefits (Harwood, Reference Harwood1986; Gang and Rivera-Batiz, Reference Gang and Rivera-Batiz1994; Hanson and Spilimbergo, Reference Hanson and Spilimbergo1999; Mayda, Reference Mayda2006; Scheve and Slaughter, Reference Scheve and Slaughter2006). Yet public opinion evidence from a variety of settings—mainly the United States, Canada, and Europe—has favored a competing explanation of bias against immigrants rooted in political psychology: rejection of individuals seen as culturally or ethnically incompatible (Citrin et al., Reference Citrin, Green and Sears1990; Schildkraut, Reference Schildkraut2011; Wright and Bloemraad, Reference Wright and Bloemraad2012; Hainmueller and Hangartner, Reference Hainmueller and Hangartner2013). Reviewing studies published over the previous 15 years, Malhotra et al. (Reference Malhotra, Margalit and Mo2013, 394) report that all find some support for the cultural threat hypothesis, while results consistent with the economic threat hypothesis are less common and often disputed.

Scholars have explored the cultural threat hypothesis from several angles. Some contend that opposition to immigrants is rooted directly in prejudicial attitudes: racism (Schildkraut, Reference Schildkraut2011), xenophobia (Wright, Reference Wright2011), or ethnocentrism (Citrin and Sides, Reference Citrin and Sides2008). Others working in the tradition of social identity theory understand anti-outsider bias as a consequence of the social and cultural distance that results from dissimilarity in attributes such as language (Hopkins, Reference Hopkins2015), religion (Adida et al., Reference Adida, Laitin and Valfort2010), skin color (Fouka et al., Reference Fouka, Mazumder and Tabellini2021), nationality, and class (Shayo, Reference Shayo2009). An influential literature in cognitive psychology and economics assumes that in-group members rank cultural and ethnic out-groups according to their perceived social distance, and seek to avoid psychological costs of interaction with out-group members that increase with distance (Tajfel et al., Reference Tajfel, Turner, Austin and Worchel1979; Turner et al., Reference Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell1987; Akerlof, Reference Akerlof1997). This self-classification produces in-group favoritism that has been observed both under minimal laboratory conditions (Brewer, Reference Brewer1979; Huddy, Reference Huddy2001) and in real-world settings ranging from the United States (Sigelman and Sigelman, Reference Sigelman and Sigelman1982), to Africa (Adida, Reference Adida2015; Carlson, Reference Carlson2015), and the Middle East (Shockley and Gengler, Reference Shockley and Gengler2020).

Another interpretation of the cultural threat hypothesis is that bias reflects sociotropic concerns about maintaining national values and identity. This perspective distinguishes more clearly between ascriptive and non-ascriptive out-group distance by observing that, although ethnic and racial differences between immigrants and the native population increase the cost of social integration for newcomers (Dustmann and Preston, Reference Dustmann and Preston2007), bias against immigrants from ethnically distant groups can be reduced if they signal conformity to national norms (Hainmueller and Hopkins, Reference Hainmueller and Hopkins2014b; Hopkins, Reference Hopkins2015), for instance by learning the local language (Schildkraut, Reference Schildkraut2005) or demonstrating valued work ethic (Hainmueller and Hopkins, Reference Hainmueller and Hopkins2014b). In this view, opinions about immigrants are primarily driven by their individual-level characteristics that signal the degree of conformity to the host country's cultural norms.

2.2 Locating the economic threat from immigration

One critique of existing tests of the economic threat hypothesis is that they fail to capture how ordinary people actually think and form opinions about immigration. This recent strand of literature has sought to move beyond the economic/cultural debate to show that negative views of immigrants may stem from principled, categorical rejection of immigration generally, or of particular (legal) types of immigrants. Wright et al. (Reference Wright, Levy and Citrin2016) use a conjoint experiment to show that a substantial proportion of Americans reject illegal immigrants out of ontological concerns over justice and respect for the rule of law, irrespective of immigrants’ identity- and economic-related attributes. Similarly, Soroka et al. (Reference Soroka, Wright, Johnston, Citrin, Banting and Kymlicka2017) conduct a survey experiment with citizens in both the United States and Canada and find that willingness to extend welfare assistance to an individual is impacted more strongly by the candidate's legal status than ethnic category. Such results imply that opposition to immigration may logically precede attribute-based judgments about what makes individual immigrants acceptable. By this view, many extant survey-based studies focus on the wrong behavioral process.

Still, despite their theoretical divergence, the attribute-based and categorical frameworks of immigration attitudes agree in concluding that orientations are not primarily, if at all, driven by rational economic calculations about the private financial impact of immigration. Malhotra et al. (Reference Malhotra, Margalit and Mo2013) suggest a straightforward reason for the relative lack of support for economic threat models: not all citizens face an economic threat from immigrants. When the authors focus on a vulnerable group—US high-tech workers—they do observe more negative attitudes toward immigrants who represent job competitors. Although they find that cultural concerns also remain strong determinants of attitudes among members of this sector, the key implication of their study is that the lack of public opinion evidence supporting the economic threat hypothesis may simply reflect a relative lack of prevalence of a labor market or other material threat across an entire population, whereas the emotions and often implicit biases that underlie cultural rejection of foreigners are more widespread. Indeed, recent evidence from another country in the MENA region, Morocco, demonstrates that job competition on a sub-national level can drive economic-related rejection of immigrants (Buehler et al., Reference Buehler, Fabbe and Han2020). However, this research may overestimate the general importance of economic compared to cultural factors due to social desirability bias since it relies on non-experimental questions.

While not mentioned by Malhotra et al., we suggest that lower cognitive burden is a separate way that surveys may privilege cultural threat models of immigration attitudes. Individuals may find it difficult to infer the impact of immigration, or of specific immigrant profiles, on their personal financial situation based on information presented in a survey. Such cognitive burden can lead to satisficing response behavior—providing survey answers that are just “good enough”—and, ultimately, measurement error (Krosnick, Reference Krosnick1991, Reference Krosnick1999). By contrast, feelings of cultural or physical threat largely tap unconscious emotions and prejudices that are more readily primed via survey questions describing immigrants or immigration scenarios. We employ treatments with specific financial information in order to preclude this possible issue.

3.1 Gulf immigration and citizenship

Attitudes toward immigrants in North America and Western Europe have drawn considerable scholarly attention, but comparatively little is known about public opinion on immigration in the Arab Gulf states. This is despite the region having both the world's largest foreign-born populations relative to local citizens, and also the most diverse non-citizen populations (Czaika and De Haas, Reference Czaika and De Haas2014). These countries—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—are collectively home to millions of foreign workers who are needed to build and maintain their hydrocarbon-based economies (Winckler, Reference Winckler1997). Although they represent an estimated 88 percent of the resident population in Qatar and constitute a majority or significant plurality in every Gulf country, immigrants are employed under a temporary labor “sponsorship” (kafāla) system that affords no political rights or path to citizenship (Okruhlik, Reference Okruhlik2011).

This practical impossibility of obtaining citizenship has invited scrutiny of the structural economic and political exclusion of vast segments of Gulf populations (e.g., Dito, Reference Dito2015; Lori, Reference Lori2019). But for scholars of the rentier state, it is a predictable consequence of the Gulf's enduring political-economic model, wherein autocratic rulers distribute a sufficient portion of resource wealth to citizens to buy political autonomy (Luciani and Beblawi, Reference Luciani and Beblawi1987; Hertog, Reference Hertog2010). The rentier monarchies share a material interest in minimizing the pool of citizens-cum-welfare recipients, so as not to dissipate the finite rent income that sustains them. By this view, as Longva (Reference Longva2006) famously argues of Kuwait, what might appear as xenophobia or identity politics is actually a case of economic protectionism.

Gulf citizens have much to protect. With some variation according to the wealth of individual states, Gulf citizenship confers an array of direct and indirect financial benefits. The government employs around 85 percent of working citizens in Qatar (Halaoui et al., Reference Halaoui, Aly, Malek and Abdel Samad2017). Gulf states also subsidize nationals via free health care and education as well as below-market prices for water, electricity, food, and other commodities (Gengler and Lambert, Reference Gengler and Lambert2016). Gulf nationality is governed by strict descent-based criteria and is only passed patrilineally. Naturalization is subject to annual limits and opaque exercise of royal prerogative, and is extremely rare (Babar, Reference Babar2014). Representative surveys of Qatari nationals conducted in 2013 and 2014 found that 90 percent of citizens supported extending citizenship to the children of Qatari mothers married to non-Qataris (Mitchell et al., Reference Mitchell, Gengler, Burns and Dedinksy2013). Although these non-experimental survey questions may present inflated levels of acceptance due to social desirability bias, the public is clearly sympathetic to this group and desires the government to reform nationalization laws (Al-Malki, Reference Al-Malki2016).

3.2 The case of Qatar

Our empirical strategy leverages the extreme rentier state of Qatar, where newly-eligible permanent residents pose direct and obvious negative financial consequences for citizens by expanding the pool of welfare beneficiaries. Enabled by the world's highest per capita resource rents, Qatar transfers a generous portion of state wealth to its citizenry of only around 350,000 individuals. Furthermore, studies have shown that citizens of rentier societies judge their economic conditions not in absolute terms but relative to those of their peers, and that perceptions of unfairness in allocation can be a powerful force for mobilization and opposition (Okruhlik, Reference Okruhlik1999). Survey evidence from Qatar, notably, has demonstrated that perceptions of relative deprivation generate negative political attitudes irrespective of a citizen's objective level of wealth (Mitchell and Gengler, Reference Mitchell and Gengler2019). Qatar's citizenry is highly homogeneous along the primary descent-based categories of race (Arab), religion (Islam), and confessional school/denomination (Hanbali Sunni). This atypical combination of economic and cultural protectionism permits a unique test of the relative importance of economic and non-economic factors in shaping citizen attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy.

Previous public opinion work in Qatar has established that citizens possess highly ambivalent views of immigrants, recognizing their necessary function in the economy while also perceiving them to be financial opportunists and a corrupting influence on conservative local culture and national identity (Diop et al., Reference Diop, Le, Johnston and Ewers2017). The vast majority of Qataris report that they would prefer a reduction in the number of foreign residents and a further tightening of the labor sponsorship system (Diop et al., Reference Diop, Le, Johnston and Ewers2017). Notably, survey experiments have revealed that Qataris express more negative attitudes toward immigrants when they are prompted to think about blue-collar laborers originating mainly from South Asian countries, compared to white-collar professionals from the Arab world and the West (Diop et al., Reference Diop, Tessler, Le, Al-Emadi and Howell2012, Reference Diop, Johnston and Le2015).

In 2017, neighboring Arab states initiated a surprise economic blockade of Qatar over a diplomatic dispute. In place until January 2021, the crisis created a need to retain and attract foreigners able to bolster economic output and external security. A law issued in 2018 made non-Qataris eligible for the first time for permanent residency, a quasi-citizenship status that confers many of the economic entitlements enjoyed by citizens. Permanent residents are granted priority access to government jobs, free health care and education, and the ability to start businesses, own property, and make investments without a local partner (Law no. 10 of 2018 regarding permanent residence, 2018). Thus, in the context of Qatar, the immigration debate centered around permanent residency. Already competitors for scarce resources, permanent residence could now access a larger and longer-term share of Qatar's economic pie, even as the embargo threatened citizens with the loss of jobs, business income, and investment returns. Interestingly, the law does not specifically mention the children of Qatari mothers as being eligible for this new status. However, due to the political relevance of this group in Qatar and throughout the Gulf, it is included in the analysis.

6.1 Categorical acceptance and ranking of immigrant types

Figure 2 presents the results of the choice task designed to generate a reliable and unbiased ranking of different claims to permanent residency. Overall, findings demonstrate the importance of categorical, in contrast with individual-level, judgment about the acceptability of potential immigrants, in line with Hypothesis 1a. They also provide strong support for Hypothesis 1b, that citizens will prioritize ascriptive-based over merit- or utility-based claims for permanent immigration to Qatar; as well as Hypothesis 1c, that the likelihood of categorical acceptance declines with perceived social distance.

Figure 2.

Treatment effects for groups.

More specifically, inclusion of blood-related candidates (children of Qatari mothers) in a basket of groups increases its probability of selection by more than 30 percent, whereas immigrants explicitly described as lacking a descent-based connection to Qatar (those from non-Qatari tribes) decreases a basket's likelihood of selection by 27 percent. A qualitative gap separates blood-relatives from the second-most favored category of permanent resident among citizens: individuals born in Qatar. This group is associated with a 5 percent increase in the probability of selection. Meanwhile, categories capturing immigrants with special skills and service elicit slight negative preferences, each being associated with around a 5 percent decrease in the likelihood that a basket of candidates is selected.Footnote ³ As the most socially proximate group, the children of Qatari mothers serve as a clear baseline against which the proximity of other groups can be judged by respondents.

We interpret the comparatively very weak preferences for groups whose ethnic and cultural attributes are unknown—i.e., those born in Qatar, those with special skills, and those who provide special service to the state—as additional evidence that citizens base their acceptance of immigrants principally on ascriptive criteria. Lacking such information, citizens cannot form a clear opinion about the suitability of a given immigrant type. Thus, the experiment shows that it is identity concerns that evoke categorical judgments about who deserves to share the privileges of (quasi-)citizenship in the rentier state, not economic ones. Qatari citizens do not fail to accept candidates for permanent residency because they view them as unable to make significant contributions to the country's economy or security (or alternatively as a drain on government resources and jobs); rather, citizens do not accept them because their ethnic and cultural identities are not sufficiently similar to their own. Stated another way, special skills or the ability to make a contribution to society is not a sufficient claim to gain access to permanent residency absent ascriptive qualifications.

6.2 Individual acceptance and rating of immigrant profiles

The choice experiment results show that citizens in Qatar tend to accept permanent residency candidates who are known coethnics and reject known non-coethnics, while withholding firm judgment on candidate types whose ascriptive attributes are ambiguous. The conjoint analysis complements these findings by zooming in on the latter group of candidates, to examine which individual-level characteristics might induce acceptance of permanent residents who lack a descent-based qualification for immigration (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Average marginal component effects for immigrant attributes.

The left-most column, labeled “Unconditional,” reports AMCEs for the treatments across the entire sample. These results show that identity factors retain some significance in shaping candidate acceptance at the individual level. Immigrants who lack a first name are penalized relative to those whose first name signals an in-group (Sunni) confessional religious affiliation. We infer that candidates whose first name was not given were less likely to be selected due to uncertainty surrounding their cultural identity, as observed in the choice experiment. Indeed, even profiles with first names that imply out-group (Shi‘i or Christian) identities were preferred to those assigned no first name. It could be that profiles lacking this information were assumed to have non-proximate identities withheld due to undesirability. Yet, rather than suggest that one religious affiliation is necessarily preferred to the others, the results instead evidence a primary desire among citizens to know the name—and thus verify the social proximity—of the immigrant.

Findings for the other culturally-relevant treatments are also consistent with the idea that, once an immigrant's descent-based qualifications have been established, other traits only impact the chances of acceptance on the margins. Qataris make no significant distinction, for instance, between candidates of a diverse set of nationalities relative to the Yemeni baseline, which is the most proximate identity category.

With regard to language, respondents give clear preference to monolingual Arabic speakers, relative to both monolingual English speakers and immigrants who speak Arabic and English. The estimated coefficient is almost indistinguishable for the latter two categories, suggesting that English is not valued for its economic utility, but rather serves as an out-group marker applying even to fellow Arabs. Citizens prefer to extend the benefits of permanent residency to persons who are linguistically similar to themselves, with any English proficiency taken as an indicator of cultural distance. As in the case of nationality, however, in substantive terms the negative effect associated with English language ability is small.

The remaining attributes included in immigrant profiles, which did not provide ethnic or cultural data, failed to generate statistically significant treatment effects. First, the length of time a non-citizen has spent in Qatar does not increase, or at all affect, acceptance as a permanent resident. As discussed, many immigrants are born and live their entire lives in Qatar and other Arab Gulf rentier states with no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. In light of the slight positive prioritization of individuals born in Qatar witnessed in the choice experiment, we interpret the null conjoint finding as reflecting the fact that some respondents in the former task likely conflated the “born in Qatar” category with preferred groups, especially children of Qatari mothers, who are also native-born.

Two suggestive findings correspond to the economically-relevant attributes of potential immigrants. Citizens appear to disfavor the highest-salaried category of candidates, who are perhaps viewed as taking more than their fair share of the country's wealth. Meanwhile, respondents slightly favor candidates in the military profession, who might contribute to the country's stability and security at a time when Qatar faced a traumatic regional embargo.

A final set of results investigate the possibility of differential treatment effects according to the respondent's degree of economic vulnerability, in line with the proposition of Malhotra et al. (Reference Malhotra, Margalit and Mo2013). The middle and right-hand columns of Figure 3 present AMCEs conditional on a citizen's household income, divided above and below a 40,000 Qatari riyal per month cut-off that is slightly below the medium household income among citizens, and mirrors the middle salary treatment category in the experiment. As expected, Qataris in the more economically vulnerable subgroup are less likely to select profiles in which the immigrant would earn an above-average salary that also exceeds their own household income. Citizens in the higher-income group are not influenced by a candidate's salary, and this between-group difference based on respondent income level is highly statistically significant (p = 0.006).

Yet the conditional results also reveal the clear influence of identity-related factors among the same lower-income citizens, including a strong aversion to immigrants whose name signals a Christian or ambiguous religious identity, and permanent residents of the only Western nationality (British) included in the experiment.Footnote ⁴ Meanwhile, it is the financially-advantaged subgroup that drives the overall negative treatment effect of English language ability and the slight positive preference for security contributors in the form of military professionals.

On balance, then, the conjoint findings provide but relatively weak support for our Hypothesis 2a, that acceptance of out-group candidates for permanent residency is judged at the individual rather than categorical level. In fact, we observe marginal impacts of individual-level attributes of candidates who lack a descent-based qualification, with no treatment estimated to alter the probability of selection by more than 5 percentage points in the overall sample. Even in the subgroup analysis, the largest estimated coefficient does not exceed 0.10. The results lend somewhat more support to Hypothesis 2b, that the ascriptive attributes of out-group members more strongly shape citizen acceptance than their economically-relevant traits. The hypothesis is largely upheld in the overall sample, where two of four factors included to capture social distance (religion, nationality, language, and length of residency) were seen to influence citizens’ choices, compared to neither of the two economically-related treatments (salary and occupation), based on the standard level of statistical confidence. Finally, we see evidence in support of Hypothesis 2c, inasmuch as lower-income individuals are less likely to accept economic competitors in the form of high-salary immigrants.

6.3 Immigration-related preferences and social desirability bias

To illustrate the value of our methodological approach, here we analyze responses to non-experimental questions included in the survey, which directly asked respondents to rate the importance they attached to the different immigrant attributes considered in the experiments, as well as their overall level of support for Qatar's new permanent residency law.

Figure 4 presents the relative difference measures described above, which indicate the importance attached to a factor compared to all others. Overall, it is difficult to distinguish between the factors, as confidence intervals are large and overlapping, indicating that respondents did not give dramatically different responses for any of the attributes. This illustrates the utility of our experimental design, which forced a choice between competing categories. Still, having a blood relationship to Qatar was clearly rated as least important relative to the other factors, in direct contradiction with the results of the choice experiment. Likewise, an immigrant's contribution to security was rated as somewhat more important than the other factors, while this category of permanent resident was disfavored in our experiment. Results give the impression that Qataris care less about broad identity groups and more about the societal contribution of a prospective immigrant, suggesting that responses to these traditional, straightforward survey items are substantially impacted by social desirability bias.

Figure 4.

Factors determining acceptance of immigrants (standardized).

The same conclusion obtains in the case of reported support for the permanent residency law itself. Mean support across the entire sample is 8.0 on a 0–10 scale, suggesting a surprisingly high degree of public enthusiasm for a measure whose clear and inevitable effect is to widen eligibility for state welfare and thus dissipate the benefits presently enjoyed by citizens. To assess the extent to which susceptibility to socially desirable reporting helps explain nominal support for the controversial legislation, we use an Arabic-language implementation of the BIDR Impression Management subscale, a well-established measure of susceptibility to socially desirable responding (Paulhus, Reference Paulhus1984). We use ordered logistic regression to predict the reported level of support as a function of impression management.Footnote ⁵

As depicted in Figure 5, reported support for the permanent residency policy is determined to a very large degree by personal susceptibility to social desirability bias. The estimated probability of expressing high support for the law increases dramatically with a respondent's engagement in impression management, measured by the BIDR scale in standard deviation terms. At a “high” value on the impression management scale (+2 standard deviations), for instance, the likelihood of expressing high support for the law is 2.3 times that of voicing low support, whereas the reverse is true among those not prone to engage in socially desirable reporting. Among this latter group at the “low” end of the BIDR scale (–2 standard deviations), the predicted probability of high support for the permanent residency policy is 29 percent, compared to a 46 percent likelihood of indicating low support. In short, after accounting for the effects of social desirability bias, one arrives at the opposite conclusion about the overall level of public support in Qatar for the permanent residency law, from the one suggested by answers to the direct survey question.

Figure 5.

Support for permanent residency law and social desirability.

How then can we accurately gauge citizen support for the policy of offering permanent residency to immigrants, the vast majority of whom lack a blood connection to Qatar? We reason that the BIDR analysis presented in Figure 5 provides a more valid estimate of overall support. More precisely, the predicted probability of high support for the permanent residency law is 40.7 percent in the absence of impression management, or social desirability bias (i.e., when the BIDR scale equals 0). This percentage also closely approximates the proportion of immigrant profiles (40 percent) that were selected in the conjoint task.Footnote ⁶ Together, the two corresponding estimates paint a very different picture from that given by the non-experimental measure, suggesting public support at approximately one-half the level implied by the answer to the direct survey question (8 out of 10, or 80 percent).