Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder? Legacies of Emigration and Attitudes Towards Immigration

Much of what we know about attitudes towards immigrants comes from countries that have absorbed multiple waves of migration in the post-war period.  However, over the past two decades the geography of migration has changed.  Late-developing countries that were long the reserve labor pool for Europe’s core industrial economies are today places of net immigration.  How do citizens in a country with a living memory of emigration react to unprecedented levels of immigration?  Just as the idea of being a ‘nation of immigrants’ helps shape views about immigration in the U.S., does being a nation of emigrants shape the response to unprecedented levels of immigration in the ‘new destination’ countries of Western Europe?  And if this is indeed the case, how - is it historical memory that matters?  Or do people need a more immediate activation of the emigration experience? 

This paper investigates the relationship between emigration and attitudes towards immigration by exploring both the geographic and personal contexts of emigration in Ireland, a country that only became a net importer of labor in the 1990s.  It first explores the relationship between the geography of emigration and attitudes towards immigration using survey data, county-level population data, and voting records from the 2004 citizenship referendum.  Then, using an experimental research design, it will test the effect of emigration-related prompts on individual attitudes towards immigration.