A common argument made by opponents to immigration is that migrants undercut the local labor market, making things harder for natives. It perhaps seems natural, therefore, for those people to also oppose automation, which may have a similar impact.
New research from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management sets out to explore the relationship between fears we have about automation, and attitudes towards immigrants. They suggest the association could unfold in one of two ways.
“First, automation may increase perceptions of realistic threat toward immigrants arising from competition for economic resources,” they explain. “Second, automation may increase perceptions of symbolic threat toward immigrants arising from changes to group values, identity, and status.”
Testing the relationship
The researchers tested their hypothesis across a series of 12 studies. Seven of these built upon data from across the United States and Europe from 1986 to 2017. The data was used to understand who perceived automation as negative to workers, and whether those same people also had a negative attitude towards immigrants.
This relationship appeared to be consistent across the 30 years studied, and endured even across various political ideologies and perceptions of other job-related threats, such as offshoring and the decline in trade unions.
“These findings suggest that automation concerns are associated with anti-immigrant sentiment, irrespective of concerns about employment more broadly,” the researchers say.
Another four of the studies used various experimental and correlational studies to understand how automation influences our perceived threats towards immigrants, and therefore our support for policies that reduce immigration.
The final study then asked volunteers to think about a scenario involving a company making layoffs in order to cut costs. They could do this either by restructuring and downsizing various departments, or by implementing new technology that automated many of the tasks currently performed by employees. The participants were asked to give a percentage for the number of employees laid off in each condition. The results revealed that those in the automation condition would often lay off more immigrants than those in the restructuring condition.
Across all of the studies, the researchers found that those of us who regard automation as a profound threat to jobs would also tend to have a negative view of immigrants. As a result of this, these people would want restrictive immigration policies to be implemented, and for immigrants to be disproportionately affected by redundancies.
It’s a finding the researchers hope may shed a degree of insight onto the relationship people have with perceived threats to their livelihood, in whatever form it takes. It perhaps points the way towards ways in which those insecurities can be addressed at source, such that the perceived vulnerabilities aren’t so prescient.
Politics and automation
The findings also hint at some of the political sources of fear of automation. A recently published paper explores some of the political implications of these new technologies, and especially of the rise in workplace automation.
The authors argue that events like Brexit, Trump and the gilet jaunes protests in France cannot be viewed as electoral accidents but rather a clear consequences of profound changes in the labor market, many of which have been produced by automation. They believe that most of the technological changes today impact those in middle-skilled routine jobs in both manufacturing and service sectors, which are predominantly held by those in the lower middle class.
This is illustrated in the well-documented hollowing out of the labor market, with the strong decline in routine jobs mirrored by growth in non-routine jobs at both the high and low end of the skills spectrum.
Unfounded fears
These are the fears that have emerged after a number of widely cited reports into the impact of technology on the labor market, but do they match reality? Routine work has historically suffered from repeated turnover that can be characterized by lower entry and higher exit rates, but relatively low numbers of those affected remain unemployed for prolonged periods.
Of course, that isn’t to say that such individuals are in a good place, and economic data does point to the stagnation in their wages compared to those of both high-skilled and low-skilled workers in non-routine roles, both of whom benefit from technological complementaries. It is this stagnation in wages that is the likely kindling for the various political fires to have emerged from, with routine workers forming a large part of the voting demographic for all of the movements highlighted above.
The authors believe that this is a largely unexplored phenomenon because past studies have focused their attention primarily on those at the lowest end of the income spectrum, therefore overlooking the kind of people who are largely being affected by technological changes today. In other words, a lot of the research to date looks squarely at those who are already outsiders rather than those who fear they might become outsiders.
