Where will the British go? And why?*

Journal article

Abstract:: Objective:
Immigration is a highly salient political issue. We examine the migration preferences of potential emigrants from the United Kingdom to determine whether the migration calculus is primarily economic or political.

Methods:
A conjoint survey experiment was conducted with U.K. subjects drawn from the CESS, Nuffield College, Oxford University, student subject pool to identify causal drivers of emigration preferences.

Results:
Logit estimation of emigration preferences indicates that economics and politics matters. Anti‐immigrant rhetoric, “Trumpian policies,” and the United States deter high‐skilled U.K. potential emigrants; economic growth, education, and social benefits attract them. Politics and social benefits are more important for those on the political left, while economics and education weigh more heavily for those on the right.

Conclusion:
What will attract the highly skilled migrants from a post‐Brexit United Kingdom? Economics matters of course but for many of these potential emigrants politics is important—they are particularly sensitive to anti‐immigrant rhetoric.

Files:: Duch et al Where will the British go.pdf

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Copyright holder:: Duch et al.
Rights statement:: © 2019 The Authors Social Science Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Southwestern Social Science Association This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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