Why Do Some Individuals Fear Immigration More than Others? Evidence from Europe

In this paper we show that individual preferences for immigration are also shaped by specific non-economic factors. In order to account for non-economic differences in a broader sense, we rely on linguistic relativity hypothesis according to which differences in grammatical structures may induce speakers of distinct languages to conceptualize and experience the world differently (Sapir, 1921; Whorf and Carroll, 1964). Linguistic variation is measured by means of a specific linguistic marker based on the number of grammatical categories (moods) concerned with the expression of uncertainty. We show that more intensive users of these specific grammatical forms are significantly more intolerant toward immigration with respect to other identical individuals speaking a different language/s. This can be attributed to unobserved general attitudes towards risk and uncertainty, since the linguistic marker strongly correlates with the individuals' level of risk aversion (Kovacic et al., 2015). The results are robust to the inclusion of additional set of explanatory and control variables,country and year fixed effects, and alternative samplings