Community-level drivers of attitudes towards immigration in Ireland

Research suggests community characteristics can shape people’s responses towards immigration, yet this remains unexplored in Ireland. This paper investigates the community-level drivers of immigration attitudes in Ireland, applying multilevel modelling to 2023 data on individuals’ attitudes, matched to small area data on their communities, which contributes to the literature by: (a) examining how community-level factors operate in a relatively ‘new immigration’ context; (b) exploring how increasing international protection (IP) migration shapes attitudes, and whether different types of IP migrants are differently related to attitudes; and (c) testing innovative measures of local pressures on services (doctors, school-places, housing) using administrative data. Findings demonstrate that communities’ migration characteristics (migrant-share, change in migrant-share) have no overall association with immigration attitudes. However, migrant-share has a positive association with attitudes in rural (but not urban) areas, while a larger recent increase in migrant-share has a negative association with attitudes in more (but not less) disadvantaged communities. Residential segregation is also associated with more negative attitudes, while areas with a larger share of asylum seekers (but not Ukrainian refugees) are positively associated with attitudes. Measures of pressures on services do not appear to be negatively associated with attitudes, despite featuring prominently in national immigration debates.