Contingent conflict and contact effects: How exposure to migrants at workplaces influences natives’ scepticism towards immigration

The article analyses how exposure to migrants at work affects natives' scepticism towards immigration. In contrast to previous literature, we create an objective measure of micro-level exposure to migrants in the workplace. To do so, we use detailed Danish register data on workplace composition in combination with individual-level survey data. The article builds a bridge between the literature predicting threat effects leading to preferences for more restrictive migration policies and the literature predicting contact effects leading to less restrictive preferences. We find that threat effects dominate when natives holding a job in the secondary labour market are exposed to “Eastern European immigrants”, while contact effects dominate when natives are exposed to “non-Western immigrants”. In the latter case, the effect does not vary between natives employed in the primary and secondary labour market. We interpret these results as indicating that exposure to immigrant groups that are culturally distant from natives is likely to lead to contact effects, while threat effects dominate when the cultural distance is small.