The Majority-Minority Divide in Attitudes Toward Internal Migration: Evidence from Mumbai
68 Pages Posted: 5 Aug 2014 Last revised: 23 Jun 2015
Date Written: 2014
Abstract
Rapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of internal migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of native residents, manifested in labor-market discrimination, political nativism, and even violence. We implemented a large, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of the population of Mumbai to elucidate the causes of anti-migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self-interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant-group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority-group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat offset one another. We introduce a new mechanism to explain this divergence in majority/minority opinion. Minority communities in a position of persistent insecurity use in-migration by co-ethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving "safety in numbers."' We contribute insights both to the immigration literature, and to policy debates over urban expansion.
Keywords: migration, urbanization, immigration attitudes, labor-market threat, ethnic prejudice, cross-cutting cleavages
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