Pressure and Presence: Regional Public Service Pressures, Asylum Accommodation, and Immigration Attitudes in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Immigration now stands as the issue cited by the British public as the top concern facing the country. Both opinion polling and academic studies have highlighted the public’s concern about immigration’s impact on public services such as the healthcare system, schools, and welfare benefits. However, studies have predominantly focused on the impact of immigration flows on objective service levels and have largely neglected the mechanism by which objective service levels could impact attitudes toward immigration. In addition, the most common approach to studying public attitudes toward immigration has been to examine attitudes on a national level. Although national-level studies can provide baseline information about attitudes, they can obscure certain effects across regions as events and differences in attitudes are absorbed into the headline finding. Addressing these two gaps in the literature, my study explores how objective conditions of particular government-provided services relate to public attitudes toward immigration on a regional level. I study two public service variables: healthcare and schools. I use National Health Service (NHS) average waiting periods and the percentage of schools at or over capacity as independent variables. Alongside these two public service variables, I also use the number of asylum seekers housed in hotel contingency accommodation per 1,000 regional residents as an independent variable. Asylum hotels are a category of government-provided accommodation for asylum seekers whose usage began after the COVID-19 pandemic in response to lengthy asylum decision waiting periods and a higher number of claimants. In recent years, asylum hotels have become one of the most salient and politically-charged aspects of the UK’s asylum debate. They have attracted protests and led to violence toward asylum seekers, and have been covered extensively in news media, making this a new and rapidly emerging dimension of the UK public’s attitudes toward immigration. All three of the variables I selected for this study are localized and observable pressures. For the healthcare and school variables, pressure manifests through constrained access to services and for asylum hotels, through visible concentrations of immigrants in local areas. This study is separated into two sections. The first deploys a combination of fixed effects and heterogeneity tests to examine the relationship between public attitudes toward immigration and objective conditions of the three independent variables. Findings indicate that there is a consistent negative relationship between the healthcare variable for waiting periods of 18 weeks or above and attitudes toward immigration across regions. The asylum hotel variable also yields a consistent negative relationship, but with fewer regions reaching statistical significance. I find no relationship between attitudes and school capacity. In section two, I test the influence of framing as an alternative mechanism by which school capacity could influence attitudes. I also test the healthcare and asylum hotels variables to provide further evidence of whether the relationship examined in section one is additionally influenced by framing or is purely based on objective pressure. To do so, I conduct an original survey experiment and find that the negative framing of each of the three variables did not predict more negative attitudes toward immigration. Further analysis indicates that this relationship is not moderated by regional-level conditions. My findings have important implications for the current government and other political actors as they seek to satisfy public demands with political strategy.