What Makes Policy Fair? Evidence from U.S. Immigrant Integration Policy and Public Opinion

Immigration attitudes research is often centered on cultural and economic threat debates. However, this focus has missed an important mechanism that guides our everyday judgments: fairness. Very limited work has engaged with fairness and little has done so in the context of immigration. To address this, I construct a theoretically grounded method for measuring different dimensions of fairness. Using an original conjoint experiment, I test how varying state-level policy attributes such as eligibility requirements, intended beneficiaries, and assistance types influence perceptions of fairness. Agreement with different dimensions of fairness and policy support increase when policies include social services and exclusion criteria. I find limited evidence for xenophobic cultural threat and sociotropic economic threat in motivating policy support. The results offer a reevaluation of immigration attitude debates and demonstrate opportunities for broader use of a multidimensional measurement of fairness, as well as suggest a framework for democratically popular subnational immigrant integration policy design.