Dustmann and Preston:Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration grounds.This hostility manifests itself in remarks of politicians and opinion leaders.For instance,the then opposition leader and future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher referred in a famous 1978 television interview to a British fear of being "rather swamped by people with a different culture" (Layton-Henry,1992,p.184).Some of the aforementioned papers present ev- idence that attitudinal questions regarding concern about identity or crime (Mayda,2005)or ideology (Scheve and Slaughter 2001)are indeed associated with preferences for tighter immigration regulation. In this paper,we contribute to the literature on attitude formation by analysing the importance of welfare concerns as well as racial and cultural prej- udice,alongside labour market concerns,as three key aspects that determine preferences about immigration.Our methodological approach is to explicitly model these three channels through which immigration attitudes may be af- fected.We do this by formulating and estimating a multiple factor model. The basic idea of our methodology is to use sets of multiple questions address- ing each of the three dimensions of concern (the labour market,welfare,and cultural or racial prejudice)and the correlations among responses to identify common underlying components.We then infer the importance of these in explaining variation in attitudes to immigration. The problem with basing conclusions on interpretation of the association between individual characteristics and immigration attitudes within a labour market model or/and a welfare model is that the most important character- istics are associated with attitudes to immigration through different channels. so that the separation of their roles is difficult.For example,the fact that the highly educated are more liberal in their attitudes may reflect that their labour market position is less vulnerable to immigration of the typically ex- pected skill composition.However,it could also reflect the strong association of education with attitudes to welfare or to culture.In this paper we explic- itly model the channels through which these may impact on attitudes about immigration regulation.An important research question which we address is then the relative contributions of these alternative explanations in explaining shifts in general attitudes of the public towards immigration,and how indi- vidual characteristics work through these channels.A further contribution of our analysis is to separate the role of the three channels in driving attitudes regarding clearly distinguishable immigrant groups.The data on which our analysis is based (various waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey,BSA) allows us to do so,as it is unusual in distinguishing explicitly between atti- tudes to immigration from different regions of origin.Our data also contains extremely specific geographical information on respondents,which allows us to merge in objective environmental information at a very precise spatial level Published by The Berkeley Electronic Press,2007 3grounds. This hostility manifests itself in remarks of politicians and opinion leaders. For instance, the then opposition leader and future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher referred in a famous 1978 television interview to a British fear of being ìrather swamped by people with a di§erent cultureî (Layton-Henry, 1992, p.184). Some of the aforementioned papers present ev￾idence that attitudinal questions regarding concern about identity or crime (Mayda, 2005) or ideology (Scheve and Slaughter 2001) are indeed associated with preferences for tighter immigration regulation. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on attitude formation by analysing the importance of welfare concerns as well as racial and cultural prej￾udice, alongside labour market concerns, as three key aspects that determine preferences about immigration. Our methodological approach is to explicitly model these three channels through which immigration attitudes may be af￾fected. We do this by formulating and estimating a multiple factor model. The basic idea of our methodology is to use sets of multiple questions address￾ing each of the three dimensions of concern (the labour market, welfare, and cultural or racial prejudice) and the correlations among responses to identify common underlying components. We then infer the importance of these in explaining variation in attitudes to immigration. The problem with basing conclusions on interpretation of the association between individual characteristics and immigration attitudes within a labour market model or/and a welfare model is that the most important character￾istics are associated with attitudes to immigration through di§erent channels, so that the separation of their roles is di¢ cult. For example, the fact that the highly educated are more liberal in their attitudes may reáect that their labour market position is less vulnerable to immigration of the typically ex￾pected skill composition. However, it could also reáect the strong association of education with attitudes to welfare or to culture. In this paper we explic￾itly model the channels through which these may impact on attitudes about immigration regulation. An important research question which we address is then the relative contributions of these alternative explanations in explaining shifts in general attitudes of the public towards immigration, and how indi￾vidual characteristics work through these channels. A further contribution of our analysis is to separate the role of the three channels in driving attitudes regarding clearly distinguishable immigrant groups. The data on which our analysis is based (various waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey, BSA) allows us to do so, as it is unusual in distinguishing explicitly between atti￾tudes to immigration from di§erent regions of origin. Our data also contains extremely speciÖc geographical information on respondents, which allows us to merge in objective environmental information at a very precise spatial level 3 Dustmann and Preston: Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration Published by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2007