Right-wing parties across the globe are campaigning – and often winning elections – on strict anti-immigration policy promises. In the United States, voters are watching as President Trump implements his campaign promise of “mass deportation.” Many of these policies are popular with a large segment of the voting public. Other voters, however, are having second thoughts as they see harsh penalties for immigrants they do not view as a threat to the nation. Trump’s “border security” policies remain popular, even as Trump supporters are telling reporters, “this is not what we voted for.”
This policy whiplash is partly due to the polarization of immigration politics since the end of the Cold War. Collapsing bipartisanship over immigration has forced politicians from both parties to rethink not just how they talk about immigration, but to prioritize which policies might help make immigration popular again with the larger public.
To talk about research on what makes immigration policies more popular, Good Authority editor Eric Gonzalez Juenke chatted with Alexander Kustov, assistant professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and author of In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular (Columbia University Press, 2025). Their discussion, lightly edited for clarity and length, is below.
Eric Juenke: In this new book, you describe what many scholars and politicians are missing when they think about people’s attitudes towards immigration. What are we getting wrong about how individuals view this issue?
Alexander Kustov: It’s true that I think many existing findings and concepts are fragmented and incomplete. I would say that there might be too much focus on minor factors, like ways to frame a certain message, or emphasize a certain type of immigration, or some kind of identity, and see how this might marginally improve people’s attitudes. Or maybe scholars focus on a particular quirk of human psychology or bias, and kind of build on that. I think it is all good – but it is incomplete. And at the same time, to the extent that there is a kind of overarching theory of everything, I think there might be a little too much focus on the role of racism. We already know from a lot of political psychology research that racial biases are really hard to change in the short and medium term. They’re like personality traits.
What I’m trying to do is to take stock of all the kinds of findings over the last 20 to 30 years and distill them into a very simple framework of what people want. And what I show is that most people can be what I call “altruistic nationalists.” They care about others, even at a personal cost. But most people prioritize their compatriots. And what they want from the government on immigration is to enact policies that are in the broad public interest. And then when people oppose immigration, it is not necessarily about their categorical opposition to all kinds of immigration no matter what, nor is it strictly driven by their racial biases.
Oftentimes their opposition is conditional, based on whether they believe the policies are good or bad for their country. The good news? I show, overall, that despite their current biases, a lot of people are willing to support more open immigration policies when they believe those policies are good for the country. So from a certain perspective, it’s a positive view. Of course, the devil is in the details, which is what the rest of the book is about.
Yes, further into the book you talk about how to get people to believe that particular policies are good for the country. You call these “demonstrably beneficial” policies. What are these policies – and how are they different from what we’ve seen in the U.S. and other democracies?
I find that simply telling people that immigration is good is not enough. We’ve done that, and so simply doing it again is not going to make this approach work. If readers take away one thing from my book, it’s that the only way to make immigration popular is for governments in power to actually implement better immigration policies.
I call these “demonstrably beneficial” policies, which is a subset of actually beneficial policies. These policies are so straightforwardly and explicitly beneficial, in fact, that most voters, regardless of their educational background or ideological values, could understand why they’re good for them and their country without being told.
The most demonstrably beneficial policy is attracting and encouraging high-skilled immigration. It’s an approach that experts hold in high regard as a really good policy. And it’s also a strategy that most voters intuitively view as beneficial. It’s fascinating that it’s really hard to make this finding go away. It doesn’t matter how you phrase the question in surveys. If you focus on a particular definition of a highly skilled or an educated foreigner, or if you focus on a particular profession, or you define it in a certain way, no matter what: A majority of voters across most countries will support inviting in highly skilled immigrants. And it’s a very rare case in the social sciences that you have a finding like this.
What I also show in my book is that these demonstrably beneficial policies can be much broader. So they’re not just about attracting specific high-skilled or highly educated immigrants. These policies can also focus on increasing work-related immigration more generally.
Let’s talk more about that because I think this is important for people who might be skeptical of this approach. Can increasing support for demonstrably beneficial policies have spillover effects into other types of immigration policies? If so, how?
I definitely believe they create spillover effects. To the extent that you can make the system as a whole popular and trusted by the voters, it gives the government more leeway to actually enact policies that they think are not as obviously beneficial to voters, but are still incredibly beneficial to the nation.
If you look at the countries with more demonstrably beneficial policies, Canada is one example that I talk a lot about in the book. Canada accepts so many immigrants of all kinds, that they can also afford to accept a lot of refugees and asylum seekers when a crisis hits.
Because they’ve built up public trust in the system and it’s kind of been ingrained in Canadians that immigration is a good thing? Is part of your argument to make immigration backlash-proof, or protected from polarization, by prioritizing demonstrably beneficial policies?
I would say it’s more accurate to talk about minimizing the backlash to the greatest extent possible. That’s because people have those racial biases that a lot of other scholars are talking about – these are real. When you have a responsible government in power, I think basically they should work to minimize the potential backlash as much as possible.
And again, sometimes we see politicians who are incentivized to demonize migrants. I show in the book that it’s much easier to do so in a country like Sweden than in Canada. It’s not because Canadians are more tolerant. And it’s not because the Canadian government came up with a more effective message, a kind of magical frame. It’s just because Canada’s policies are very different on the ground in terms of policy design, and also in the type and the number of immigrants that they attract. Consequently, Canada has this kind of prototypical demonstrably beneficial system. Canada selects many immigrants via a points-based system designed to help bring in the skilled workers the country needs.
Even now, despite some of the setbacks that Canada has had recently, I think it’s pretty clear that the Canadian approach is much better, even from a humanitarian point of view. I spend a full chapter in the book comparing Sweden and Canada in terms of their long-term stability and Canada’s ability to establish more broadly popular immigration policies.
In that sense, rather than striving to change people’s hearts and minds on immigration, I would like to see more researchers try to identify the trade-offs voters are willing to accept, and see policymakers craft better policies based on these trade-offs, so more countries can follow Canada’s successful example.
