When people judge who gets to immigrate, geopolitics beats race and culture: a conjoint experiment in twenty-two democracies, replayed choice by choice.
Respondents in 22 democracies saw pairs of applicants for permanent residency with randomized attributes — age, gender, occupation, language, years in the country, and a country of origin chosen to vary two things at once: geopolitical rivalry and racial-cultural similarity. In Western countries that meant Russia vs. Ukraine (similar) and China vs. Japan (dissimilar). Watch the task run; the only systematic difference in these simulated choices is the paper's 7.6 pp rival penalty.
In marginal means — the probability an applicant with a given attribute is chosen — immigrants from rival countries land 7.6 pp below non-rivals. And the racial-similarity prediction runs backwards: applicants perceived as racially and culturally similar do slightly worse (−1.2 pp) than dissimilar ones. Rivalry's pull is smaller than language fluency or unemployment, but larger than gender or years of residence.
marginal means, pooled across 22 countries · confidence intervals too small to draw at n = 46,549 · the 0.50 line is indifference
The classic expectation is homophily: people prefer immigrants who look and live like themselves. But antipathy toward rivals and sympathy for non-rivals is strong enough to flip it — Western respondents preferred racially and culturally dissimilar non-rivals (Japanese applicants) over similar rivals (Russian applicants). The aversion was strongest exactly where rivalry burned hottest: toward Russia in the West, toward China in Japan and Korea.
The surveys were in the field when Russia invaded Ukraine. As the rivalry escalated into open war, anti-rival and pro-ally bias sharpened in real time: the probability of granting a Ukrainian applicant permanent residency climbed toward 0.6 within a week — an alliance effect that mirrors the rivalry penalty, and evidence that the mechanism really is geopolitics.
Who gets welcomed isn't only about race, religion, or skills — it tracks the host country's friends and enemies. As alliances shift, so do the boundaries of welcome: a finding with uncomfortable implications for every diaspora living downstream of a rivalry.
Wimmer, Andreas, Bart Bonikowski, Charles Crabtree, Zheng Fu, Matt Golder, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui. “Geo-Political Rivalry and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: A Conjoint Experiment in 22 Countries.” American Political Science Review 119(2): 1018–1035, 2025.
read the paper →marginal means and the 7.6 pp / 1.2 pp estimates are the paper's (figure 1); the simulated choices in scene 01 encode only the rival penalty · the war chart is a stylized rendering of the escalation analysis (figure 5), where ally acceptance approaches 0.6 within a week