Increasing Immigrant Inclusion: Family History, Empathy, and Immigration in the United States

The United States, long considered a nation of immigrants, has in recent years experienced heightened polarization of opinions about immigration. While emerging research suggests that exposure or connection to migrants and their experiences increases the likelihood of positive attitudes, no study had explicitly tested whether “empathy,” or reminding people of their shared migratory experiences (even if occurring in earlier generations), could shift attitudes on immigration. Increasing Immigrant Inclusion: Family History, Empathy, and Immigration in the United States published by the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University uses data from three separate survey experiments to show that priming Americans on their own family immigration histories can modestly increase support for immigrants and more generous immigration policies. Survey respondents included members of all major political parties and members of partisan subgroups generally perceived to have negative attitudes about immigrants. The authors suggest that, despite being small and short-term, those effects could be of value to election strategists and politicians as well as comparative studies of migration attitudes and larger-scale intervention efforts. (Jasmina Popaja for The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute)

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