Regional Integration Support: A Positive Externality toward Migration Attitudes

Public opinion in favor of regional unification is usually seen as key for successfully implementing such integration projects. We argue that, as a positive externality, it can also foster support for migration. Focusing on the case of Europe, we use in-group and out-group dynamics as a starting point and claim that citizens who are more supportive of EU unification tend to have dual-identity and more cosmopolitan attitudes, which is linked to more support for migration from outside the region. We employ hierarchical models using all existing rounds of the European Social Survey and complement this with a panel-data analysis based on the German Longitudinal Election Data to exploit the individual-level evolution of attitudes over time. The empirical findings strongly support the theoretical expectations, and they shed new light on our understanding of how public attitudes toward migration are formed.