Reacción a "A study examines public attitudes towards different groups of migrants"

This study raises a legitimate question: which characteristics of immigrants influence citizens’ willingness to accept them? However, I have serious methodological reservations. Meta-analyses combine studies with different samples, varying criteria for representativeness, and experimental designs that are not strictly comparable. Aggregating all this data and drawing broad conclusions makes me sceptical. The standardisation effort is commendable, but it does not resolve the underlying problem.

The most robust finding — that political predispositions shape the criteria citizens use to evaluate immigrants — is not surprising. We humans share fairly universal concerns about who contributes to the host society; what varies is how political identity activates or suppresses those preferences. Furthermore, journalists should be cautious about the ‘global’ narrative: confidence intervals in the Global South are notably wider, reflecting real heterogeneity in preferences, not just a lack of data. And it is precisely in the Global South where the world’s most intense migration corridors occur. With 1.5 million observations, we still have a very partial picture.