Partisanship, local context, group threat, and Canadian attitudes towards immigration and refugee policy

The 2015 Canadian federal election campaign brought to the fore partisan cleavages in approaches to immigration policy, refugee policy, and multiculturalism. At the level of mass public opinion, research on attitudes toward immigration in Canada and other immigrant-receiving countries has pointed to a variety of explanatory factors. These include partisanship, economic interests, and feelings of cultural threat. There is also a growing literature on the effects of local demographic (specifically ethnic or immigrant) context in shaping attitudes toward immigration. Such a contextually-oriented approach, however, has been pursued by relatively few analysts of Canadian public opinion. This article endeavours to fill this gap. It brings together recent survey data and local-level demographic data to answer the question of what leads Canadians to hold open or restrictionist attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, focusing on the roles of partisanship, contextual measures of local immigrant populations, and perceptions of economic and cultural threat