The marginal effect of unemploy ×isb is significantly negative in Germany,
Spain and the UK. For the former two countries, the effect of unemploy is
significantly positive, suggesting that the unemployed were more restrictive
than the rest in sectors where the share of foreign workers in employment is
relatively low. This might be due to the fear of being invaded rather than
already realized penetration by immigrant workers.
At the Union level, the effect of unemploy is significantly positive as in
Table 4, but the magnitude is larger. The marginal effect of unemploy × isb
is not statistically significant.
The results for the other explanatory variables remain almost the same
as in Table 4.
[Tables 6(a) and 6(b) about here]
The results in Tables 4 and 5 confirmed our expectation about the effect
of employ only in a few countries, while we found counter evidence in a few
other countries. At the Union level, the status of being an employer does
not seem to matter to individual preferences for immigration restriction.
This could be due to the fact that employers had different opinions about
the economic impact of immigration, while the assumption for deriving the
hypotheses is that employers anticipate immigration to reduce the cost of
labor by increasing labor supply.
In order to control for the perception of the economic impact of im-
migration, we split the sample into two such that, within each subsample,
21