Each respondent was asked to choose one of the following 4 ordered cate-
gories: “none”, “a few”, “some” and “many”. We collapse these to create a
binary variable, anti, that indicates a preference for immigration restriction,
i.e., for individual i,
I 1 if she/he chose either “none” or “a few”
antii =
I 0 otherwise.
3.2 Explanatory variables
The main explanatory variable of interest is a dummy variable that is equal
to 1 if a respondent employed at least one person including her-/himself
and 0 otherwise.8 We call this variable employ. According to Section 2,
employers would be less likely to prefer immigration restriction if immigrants
were perceived to increase the supply of labor. They would be more likely
to prefer immigration restriction if immigrants were perceived to increase the
number of producers.
Figure 1 shows the distributions of respondents with employ =1and
those with employ =0, respectively, over the 4 ordered categories on which
our dependent variable is based. It implies that employers were more, rather
than less, restrictive than the others, regarding immigration from poorer
8 Question F13 of ESS asked “How many employees do or did you have?” to those
who chose “selfemployed” in Question F12. Although the respondents were supposed
to be filtered by Question F12 in this way, we found some respondents who recorded a
positive number of employees in F13 but did not chose “selfemployed” in F12. Question
F12 asked each respondent to choose either “an employee”, “selfemployed” or “working
for your own family’s business” that best described her/his status in her/his main job.
If the respondent was not working at the time of the interview, the question was asked
about her/his previous job. We did not exclude those non-selfemployed employers. That
is, employ =1if a respondent either chose “selfemployed” in F12 or recorded a positive
integer in F13, or both.