Relational Skill Assets and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments

Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Social Science Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch
Relational skill assets and anti-immigrant sentiments

Naeyun Lee, Cheol-Sung Lee
Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 24 January 2013
Revised 11 January 2015
Accepted 1 February 2015
Available online 16 February 2015
Keywords:
Anti-immigrant sentiment
Anti-immigrant attitudes
Occupational skills
Relational skills
a b s t r a c t
This study introduces the role of relational skill assets in accounting for attitudes toward
immigrants: relational skill assets. Drawing upon stratication researchers notion of
non-cognitive skills, we build a theoretical framework highlighting the role of occupational skill requirements in explaining anti-immigrant sentiment. Then, utilizing two
occupation-specic measures, interpersonal skill requirement and instrumental skill
requirement, we construct an explanatory factor, relational skill specicity. We test its
effect on anti-immigrant attitudes as well as on the concentration of foreign-born workers
in occupations, using the 2004 national identity module of General Social Survey. The ndings conrm our argument that workers with a higher possession of interpersonal skill
assets relative to instrumental skill assets are exposed to less intense competitions with
immigrants, and are therefore less likely to express anti-immigrant sentiments. Our ndings suggest that occupational-level relational skill assets based on sociocultural differences play an important role in shaping native workers attitudes toward immigrants.
2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Growing numbers of immigrants have transformed socio-economic and demographic structures in advanced industrial
countries. Native populations in these rich countries have developed varied responses to the newcomers from developing
countries. While some native workers show favorable attitudes toward migrants, others exhibit hostility. In an attempt to
understand these responses, social scientists, on one hand, have sought to identify the determinants of natives responses
to immigrants, mostly by underscoring individuals social and demographic aspects (Espenshade and Hempstead, 1996;
Semyonov et al., 2002), perceived threats on group interests (Blumer, 1958; Bobo and Hutchings, 1996) or cross-national
variations in structural conditions such as population composition and unemployment (Quillian, 1995; Semyonov et al.,
2006).
Meanwhile, on the other hand, scholars of labor market have applied their utilitarian ways of thinking to interpreting the
growing anti-immigrant sentiments in Western societies, by emphasizing the role of skill-based labor-market competition
(Borjas et al., 1997). In their perspective, the basis of anti-immigrant sentiment originates primarily from erce competition
between low-skilled natives and immigrant workers. The recent theoretical developments and applications advance this line
of labor-market competition theory by incorporating trade theories such as the Heckscher-Ohlin family of factor endowment
models: skilled workers will move from rich, skill-abundant countries to poor, labor-abundant countries, while unskilled
workers will move from poor to rich countries, thereby driving unskilled workers in rich countries in vulnerable positions
(Scheve and Slaughter, 2001; Mayda, 2006; ORourke and Sinnott, 2006; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010). Based on this logic,
Corresponding author at: 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, United States.
E-mail addresses: naeyun@uchicago.edu (N. Lee), chslee@uchicago.edu (Cheol-Sung Lee).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.02.004
0049-089X/ 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289
271
unskilled native workers in rich countries will be more discontented with the inux of unskilled immigrants, as it increases
competition in the labor market already exacerbated by the rise of the service economy.
We nd that there are unexplored dimensions for explanatory variables in these studies of attitudes toward immigration,
and introduce a new independent variable: the role of occupation-specic relational skills. Conventional approaches in this
area mostly treat skills as a general construct of human capital (Becker, 1964). Students of attitudes toward immigrants pay
their primary attention to labor market competitions based on skill levels, structural conditions such as the size of out-group
populations and unemployment at regional level (Quillian, 1995; Kunovich, 2004; Semyonov et al., 2006). Scholars of immigrant labor, on the other hand, have concentrated on the effect of human and social capital on immigrant earnings.
This study argues that two components of relational skills, interpersonal and instrumental skills, play a critical role in
shaping anti-immigrant sentiments. We will propose two causal mechanisms: (1) rst, the notion of relational skill specicity will capture the degree of transferability of skill assets across different cultures and societies, which will eventually
determine workers occupational-specic exposure to competitions with immigrants; (2) second, it will also represent personality traits and facets (Heckman and Kautz, 2012) that involve intellectual and emotional openness, trust, and unselshness, arising from pre- and post-labor market training. We assume that these personality traits, correlated with
occupational skill requirements, will also determine workers sentiments toward immigrants. In the subsequent sections,
we propose three sets of hypotheses and causal explanations that link occupation-specic relational skills with
anti-immigrant sentiments, and then test them with a General Social Survey module (National Identity, 2004).
2. Theoretical discussions
This study highlights the signicance of occupational-level relational skill standards in accounting for attitudes toward
immigrants. We dene relational skill standards as average skill requirements of an occupation needed for workers to perform appropriate levels of job-specic tasks in their interactions with people and tools.1 Specically, they refer to occupational skill requirements of a workers functional tasks in relation to people such as co-workers, transaction partners, and
customers, as well as things or objects such as products, devices, and tools.
Regarding people dimension, we note that any occupational tasks cannot be performed without simple or complex interactions among people. Workers of an occupation may have to help others or serve the requests by others. They may have to
exchange information with others or closely communicate with others in order to produce products or provide services. For
some occupations, the interpersonal skills constitute the core essence of their job functions. For lawyers, persuasion and
negotiation skills are the key components of different stages of legal procedures, not only for lawsuits in courts, but also
for informal settlements outside courts (Heinz and Laumann, 1982). For sales representatives, explaining the functions of
products to their customers, and instructing subordinates and reporting to their supervisors are essential parts of their jobs.
With respect to things dimension, workers often deal with simple to complex tools and machines. For a carpenter, being
able to handle necessary tools comprises a core essence of his or her job performance. A scientist in a biology lab should
know how to operate and manage lab equipment, and how to raise and maintain living organisms on a regular basis.
Note that, although manual laborers need to communicate with their colleagues for simple instructions or procedural protocols, communication skills are less essential than their skill with tools or machines. However, a scientist working in a
laboratory may be required to communicate with co-workers at very diverse, sophisticated, and complex levels while simultaneously holding high levels of skills to handle laboratory facilities.
These aspects of skill assets have been largely neglected in stratication research since Cain and Treiman (1981)s
pioneering exploration of DOT (Dictionary of Occupational Titles) measures and a couple of subsequent investigations using
such measures as nurturant skill (Kilbourne et al., 1994). In recent years, scholars have started to use the Occupational
Information Network (ONET) data (see Liu and Grusky, 2013; Kunovich, 2013a, 2013b). The previous studies on immigrants
labor market experience have also paid little attention to the role of relational skills. The conventional approaches have
mostly attributed migrants earnings decit to the lack of human capital and the concentration of social capital within ethnic
communities (Reitz, 2001; Aguilera and Massey, 2003; Waldinger and Lichter, 2003; Li, 2004, 2008; Cranford, 2005; Ness,
2005; Nakhaie, 2007).
Departing from these preexisting views, our study argues that relational skills play an important role in shaping
anti-immigrant sentiments through two mechanisms. First, relational skills will limit the supply of not only domestic
labor-market competitors, but also immigrants or foreign workers who aspire to enter into or move up in the labor market.
Subsequently, exposure to immigrants in a respective occupational labor market will affect the job qualities, wage levels, and
the risk of unemployment for native workers (at least their perceptions of them), eventually shaping their attitudes toward
immigrants. Second, relational skills required for occupational tasks tend to be correlated with personality traits (Heckman
and Kautz, 2012) that bring in openness to (new) experiences, tendency to act in a cooperative unselsh manner, and
(sympathetic) tender-mindedness all of which may foster more favorable understanding of immigrants situations and
their contributions to a host society. The following sections identify causal mechanisms between occupational skill assets
and native workers attitudes toward immigrants.
1
The following sections on interpersonal and instrumental skills further elaborate on the denition and the concept of occupational skills regarding people
and tools dimensions.
272
2.1. Interpersonal skills and anti-immigrant sentiments

We dene interpersonal skills as a type of mental and physical practices that involve different levels and repertoires of
interactions and communications among human beings, needed to develop temporary or prolonged relationships in diverse
institutionalized work settings. Interpersonal skills range from mere helping or serving to more sophisticated skills, such
as mentoring (highest), negotiating, instructing, and supervising (US Department of Labor, 1991). Therefore, interpersonal
skills carry social skill components within them and some scholars call this soft skills as opposed to formal or technical
knowledge (Moss and Tilly, 1996, 253).
Each occupation requires workers to demonstrate the ability to motivate cooperation in other actors (Fligstein, 1997,
398) regarding its functional tasks. Employees in an occupation (or occupational eld) should be able to relate to the situation of the other, where others include co-workers, transaction partners (suppliers and buyers), clients, and customers.
They should be able to comprehend, and perform their roles and tasks based on their interpersonal relations or on their
orientations to each other or to shared goals (Martin, 2003, 29). A large share of these skills partly originates from or is reinforced through formal educational training and on-the-job training (Becker, 1964), but also tends to be obtained through
family background (Lareau, 2002) or neighborhood and friendship networks (Coleman, 1988). As an important part of
non-cognitive skills (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, 2002; Bowles et al., 2001), interpersonal skills also include work habits,
self-condence, self-esteem, and calmness (Farkas, 2003). Interpersonal and communicative skills obtained in informal lifeworlds eventually develop into the skills needed for adequate performance in higher education and the workplace.
This study assumes that there exist two primary venues by which native workers develop sentiments toward immigrants
through interpersonal skills: (1) labor market competition and labor supply; and (2) personality traits or soft skills. First,
interpersonal skills may function as skill barriers, discouraging immigrants from entering certain occupations or industries
that formally or informally require highly sophisticated, culturally shaped skills, thereby shielding native workers from
intense job competition. Interpersonal skills are generally less transferrable across different societies. Thus, immigrants lack
of understanding of appropriate local norms, habits, conventions, routines, and practices may inhibit their adequate performance in particular job tasks that require highly nuanced skills for interpersonal interactions, and limit their chances of
moving up to higher positions. With the presence of language barriers in certain occupations, language skills will also directly determine immigrants aspirations in local job markets (Portes et al., 1978).2
The second mechanism operates through personality traits and soft skills formed by pre-labor market experiences and
on-the-job training. Those with higher levels of interpersonal skills are more likely to possess certain personality traits that
facilitate a better understanding of other peoples situations, and therefore give a sympathetic support for immigrants even
before their entries into occupational worlds primarily through earlier formal and informal educational experiences. After
entering the workplace, workers with jobs requiring higher levels of interpersonal skills are more likely to be in situations
dealing with other peoples interests and concerns or cooperating with others, both of which require a certain level of trust
of others and relatively unknown outsiders. Therefore, those who chose occupations requiring high levels of interpersonal
skills will be more likely to develop more favorable views of immigrants.3
To summarize, interpersonal skills may not only serve as signicant skill barriers against the immigrant labor force, but
also capture certain personality traits or soft skills developed before or after entering the occupation. As a result, native
workers in jobs that require high levels of interpersonal skills will be insulated from direct competitions against
out-group members including immigrants, and also better able to understand the plight of immigrants. These theoretical
expectations lead to the following hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1-1. Occupations requiring high levels of interpersonal skills will have fewer immigrant workers.
Hypothesis 1-2. Workers with high levels of occupation-specic interpersonal skills (pj) will show less anti-immigrant
sentiments.
2.2. Instrumental skills and anti-immigrant sentiments
Instrumental skill standards capture skill requirements of each occupation in relation to tools, devices, machines, equipment, vehicles, and substance or raw materials. In contrast to interpersonal skill standards, instrumental skill standards do
not carry social skill components. As it refers to workers ability to prepare, adjust, and control the operation of machines,
tools, and materials on their job routines, it is impersonal, performance-oriented, and manual labor-related.
The two venues through which interpersonal skills affect anti-immigrant sentiments may be also applicable to instrumental skills. First, the impersonal aspect of instrumental skill standards is likely to attract immigrant workers with or without high levels of instrumental skills, resulting in increased competition with native-born workers for jobs. Instrumental skill
2
Although it is unclear how much language skills and interpersonal skills shape each other, it is obvious that two skills are highly correlated with each other.
We control for the effect of language skills through the variable, cognitive skill complexity in our analyses in Tables 2 and 3.
3
A reviewer pointed out that workers with higher interpersonal skills may be able to better relate to the situation of others and therefore those workers
are less likely to develop anti-immigrant sentiments. We nd our rst mechanism (through personality traits) embraces this view.
273
standards can be directly convertible across cultures and societies without any discounts. Therefore, even immigrant workers who initially lack these instrumental skills may be willing to invest in them, whereas it is difcult to obtain interpersonal
skills over a comparably short time span. In this sense, we expect that native skilled manual workers with higher investments in instrumental skill assets, and concomitantly with higher incomes, will develop the strongest hostility toward immigrants as they are likely to lose more in the event that they are replaced by immigrants.
Second, those with jobs requiring high levels of instrumental skills may be less likely to possess soft skills or personality
traits (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; John and Srivastava, 1999) that enable a deeper understanding of others situations. Their
initial entrance into jobs that require higher levels of instrumental rather than interpersonal skills may imply a lack of personality traits that lead to sympathetic support for others. Furthermore, after entering the occupation, their isolated nature
of work life may deprive their chance of developing these personality traits. Thus, we expect that these high-instrumental
skill-workers will be more likely to develop negative feelings toward members of outgroups.
In summary, native workers holding a high level of instrumental skill may not only have difculty understanding of the
plight of immigrants and others, but also confront ercer competitions from immigrant workers with a similar level of skills
but lower wage demands. Their lack of soft skills or personality traits as well as perceived or experienced vulnerability to
competition with skilled immigrants in terms of high instrumental skills, ensuing downward pressures on their wages, and
eventually higher risk of unemployment, lead them to develop stronger anti-immigrant sentiments.4 Based on the preceding
discussion, we predict as follows:
Hypothesis 2-1. Occupations requiring high levels of instrumental skills will have more immigrant workers.
Hypothesis 2-2. Workers with high levels of occupation-specic instrumental skills (tj) will show more anti-immigrant
sentiments.
2.3. Relational skill specicity and anti-immigrant sentiment: two dilemmas
Two types of aforementioned skill sets, interpersonal skills necessary for human interaction on job tasks and instrumental
skills required for dealing with things and objects on job routines and practices, constitute a notion of occupation-specic
relational skill specicity.5 The relative composition of the two types of skills captures the degree to which a worker possesses
interpersonal skill assets relative to the total skill assets (the sum of interpersonal and instrumental skill assets). In our framework, the relational skill specicity, pj/(tj + pj),6 reects two aspects. First, the higher the proportion of pj is, the less culturally
convertible the entire skill set of a particular occupation will be. Therefore, native workers in occupations with higher interpersonal skill requirements will be more insulated from competition with immigrants. Second, the higher the proportion of pj is,
the greater the chance that a member of a particular occupation will have personality traits and soft skills that enable a better
understanding others situation and their contribution to the society.
In other words, this study assumes that this notion of relational skill specicity is likely to capture not only native workers capacity to understand outgroup members but also the degree of exposure to competition with immigrant workers,
which depends on the transferability of skill assets across different cultures and societies. Therefore, native workers in occupations requiring a higher possession of interpersonal skills in their total skill sets may be in dualistic situations. On one
hand, they may be inclined to embrace immigrants based on their soft, communicative skills, while they are also protected
from competitions with immigrants by skill barrier mechanisms based on the low convertibility of interpersonal skills. The
rst characteristic leads them to support and favor the presence of more immigrants, but the second characteristic shows
that they are already economically sheltered from intense competitions.
However, workers in occupations requiring a lower possession of interpersonal skills relative to instrumental skills
may face an opposite situation. They are less likely to possess personality traits that develop empathy for outgroup members, while the lower level of interpersonal skills requirement will facilitate the movements of workers across borders due
to the lack of social skill barriers. Therefore, incumbent native workers in this type of jobs will have to tolerate the high
perceived risk of downward wage pressure and unemployment. We argue that two mechanisms, lack of soft skills or
related personality traits, and intensied competition, may reinforce each other and end up producing
stronger anti-immigrant sentiments among native workers with a higher possession of instrumental skills over interpersonal skills.
4
We have a measure of the proportion of foreign-born workers/immigrants in each occupation imported from the Current Population Survey March 2000
data, which allows us to test the labor market competition/labor supply causal venue, but do not have a direct measure of the pre- and post-labor market
training mechanisms through personality traits or soft skills. In actual analyses, therefore, we will introduce our relational skill measures along with the
proportion of immigrants in each occupation variable, and then surmise that the remaining signicant effects of relation skill measures will reect the
personality traits aspects.
5
We develop this relational skill specicity as a summary measure of two dimensions of relational skills, and aim to introduce it in a regression equation as
a single measure (as introducing both interpersonal and instrumental skills causes a collinearity problem due to a relatively high correlation between them).
6
The formula was directly borrowed from Iversen and Soskice (2001) skill asset specicity, s/(g + s), in which s denotes rm-specic skills, while g
represents general skills that are transferable across rms. For discussion on occupation or industry-specic skills (beyond rm-specic skills), see Mares
(2003), Neal (1995, 2000), and Acemoglu and Pischke (1999)s works.
274
Hypothesis 3-1. Occupations with a higher possession of interpersonal skills over the entire skill assets have a lower level of
inux of immigrants.
Hypothesis 3-2. Workers employed in jobs requiring a greater possession of interpersonal skills over the entire skill assets
will show lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiments.
Fig. 1 summarizes the causal ows between relational skill specicity and anti-immigrant sentiment. Relational skill
specicity affects natives attitudes toward immigrants directly (A), but also indirectly through the percentage of
foreign-born in an occupation (A-1 and A-2). The goal of this paper is to test these two channels: direct and indirect pathways of relational skills on anti-immigrant attitudes. In the direct causal path (A), we assume that a high level of relational
skill specicity in ones occupation will lead to a lower level of anti-immigrant sentiments. For instance, those with high
levels of interpersonal skills may be better able to understand other peoples situation or those who succeed in building
interpersonal skills may intrinsically have higher levels of sympathy or empathy of others. In the indirect causal ows,
low or high relational skill specicity for an occupation will affect the percentage of foreign-born workers in that occupation
(A-1). The extent of exposure to foreign-born workers in ones occupation will induce incumbent native workers to develop
high or low anti-immigrant sentiment (A-2).
3. Data and measures
3.1. Anti-immigrant sentiment
This study tests the proposed hypotheses, using a module of the General Social Survey (2004) on national identity and
citizenship.7 Using four questions on respondents attitudes toward immigrations, this study constructs a composite, weighted
average index of anti-immigrant sentiments based on the factor loadings identied by conrmatory factor analysis (CFA). The
question used to construct the composite index is: there are different opinions about immigrants from other countries living in
America (By immigrants we mean people who come to settle in America). How much do you agree or disagree with each of
the following statements? The question subsequently display the following four statements: (Y1) Immigrants are generally
good for the economy; (Y2) Immigrants take jobs away from people who were born in America; (Y3) Immigrants improve
American society by bringing in new ideas and cultures; and (Y4) Immigrants increase crime rates.8 The response categories
follow the Likert scale: (1) strongly agree; (2) agree; (3) neither agree nor disagree; (4) disagree; (5) strongly disagree. The four
questions deal with respondents sentiments of immigrants regarding the general economy, employment/unemployment, cognitive/cultural diversity, and everyday security, respectively.9 In constructing the composite index, response categories are
rescaled to assign higher scores to stronger sentiments against immigrants.
3.2. Interpersonal and instrumental skill standards
In order to measure relational aspects of skill requirements for each occupation, we matched the occupation variable in
the GSS 2004 module with the DOT (Dictionary of Occupational Titles) (U.S. Department of Labor, Employment, and Training
Administration, 1991) classication system of occupational categories. The former based on the ISCO 88 (the International
Standard Classication of Occupations) contains about 400 occupational categories. We link these 400 occupations with the
DOTs more detailed occupational groups. Through this matching process, we were able to import seven DOT measures of
occupational skill requirements. Among them, two DOT measures, a jobs relationships to people and things, are used to capture relational skill assets. First, a jobs functional requirement in relation to people (pj), interpersonal skill requirement, is
based on the following hierarchical ordering of interactive, communicative relationships among people: taking
instructions-helping (1), serving (2), speaking-signaling (3), persuading (4), diverting (5), supervising (6), instructing (7),
negotiating (8), and mentoring (9). Second, a jobs skill requirements for dealing with things (tj) are based on the following
ordering: handling (1), feeding-offbearing (2), tending (3), manipulating (4), driving-operating (5), operating-controlling (6),
precision working (7), and setting up (8).10 Both measures are reverse-ordered from the original scale to denote higher skill
7
Currently, the GSS 2004 data is the most recent dataset in the U.S. with detailed information on native workers attitudes toward immigrants and their
occupations.
8
Most studies using GSS (or ISSP, International Social Survey Programme) use another question, Do you think the number of immigrants to [country]
nowadays should be. . . 1. Increased a lot; 2. Increased a little; 3. Remain the same; 4. Reduced a little; 5. Reduced a lot. I nd this question does not necessarily
measure how respondents feel about immigrants in different areas of socio-economic matters. The question captures the degree to which respondents consider
the current and future numerical immigration level appropriate for the society. It is completely possible to answer remain the same for this question, while
being strongly positive or negative about the presence of immigrants.
9
The four questions load on one factor in exploratory factor analysis. Conrmatory factor analysis using STATA 12 gives the following factor loading
estimates: 1.000 for general economy (Y1); 1.034 for employment/unemployment (Y2); 1.048 for ideas/cultures (Y3); 1.073 for crime (Y4). Overall model t
measures are satisfactory, when judged based on Bollen (1989)s recommendations, with the exception of RMSEA (p-value < 0.000; IFI = .976; NFI = .975;
TLI = .929; RMSEA = 0.113). The nal composite score was calculated as: Anti-immigrant Sentiment Composite Score = (1.000Y1 + 1.002Y2 + .914Y3 + .842Y4)/4. In addition, we also tested the simple sum of four raw scores, which achieves a fairly high level of reliability (Cronbachs a reliability coefcient = 0.78)
and produces the same results.
10
Detailed denitions and explanations of each stage are in Appendix B.
275
Beer able to relate to others situaons

(due to so skills or personality traits)
Causal Flow A
Relaonal Skill
Specicity in
Occupaon
An-Immigrant
Senment
A-1
A-2
Percentage of ForeignBorn in Occupaon
Fig. 1. Causal mechanism: the effect of relational skill specicity on anti-immigrant sentiment.
requirements for higher values.11 These 1 to 9 and 1 to 8 ordered categories are directly used as scores for interpersonal skill
asset and instrumental skill asset.12
3.3. Relational skill specicity
Then we constructed a measure of relational skill specicity with these two skill requirements at the occupational level.
The measurement scheme of this relational skill specicity is inspired by Iversen and Soskices work and their Varieties of
Capitalism school (VoC hereafter) approach (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Iversen and Soskice, 2001).
They have recently highlighted the role of workers skill asset portability/specicity across rms in explaining demands
for social protection. The VoC literature claims that workers who have invested in rm-specic skills relative to general skills
are more likely to support the public provision of social welfare, because they are exposed to greater risk of unemployment
and income loss due to their low transportability of skill assets across rms (Iversen and Soskice, 2001). Based on this logic,
we expand the notion of skill specicity across rms to skill specicity across national borders and cultures. Relational skill
specicity is measured as the ratio, pj/(tj + pj), in which a respondents jobs interpersonal skill requirement divided by her
jobs total relational skill requirements (the sum of instrumental skill requirement and interpersonal skill requirement). It
measures the necessary amount of interpersonal skills per one unit of total relational skills to demonstrate an adequate
execution of tasks specic to an occupation.
3.4. Percentage of foreign-born in respondents occupational category13
In order to ascertain the relationship between relational skill specicity and anti-immigrant sentiments, we introduce the
percentage of foreign-born in ones occupational category as a dependent variable and a control. First, we test whether high
or low levels of relational skill specicity in occupations have an effect on the actual percentage of foreign-born workers in
these occupations. Secondly, we use the percentage of foreign-born workers in each occupational category to assess the indirect effect of relational skill specicity on attitudes toward immigrants.
Previous research by Kunovich (2013a, 2013b) also employs the percent of Mexicans and immigrants in occupations to
investigate the impact of labor market competition on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies by using
ONET and GSS 2004 data. His ndings show that the effect of percent of Mexican in occupation on anti-immigrant attitudes is largely spurious, and is mostly due to the fact that occupations with high percentage of Mexicans tend to have workers with less education who are also more likely to perceive threat.
Our analysis differs from these previous studies in two important ways. First, our main focus is on examining both direct
and indirect effects of occupational skills (e.g. relational skill specicity) on anti-immigrant sentiments. Thus, we use the
variable percentage of foreign-born in ones occupation to test the indirect effect of relational skill specicity, i.e. exposure
to competition with foreign-born workers within occupations. Second, we use regression (OLS) models with HuberWhite
11
Another dimension of relational skill requirements contained in the DOT is skill requirement in relation to data. This measure, based on factor analysis,
turns out to be more related to cognitive skill dimension (Kilbourne et al., 1994). Therefore, it is included as a component of cognitive skill complexity.
12
Obviously, we assume that ordinal scales may be treated as interval. Previous studies report that this treatment does not involve too much distortion
(Labovitz, 1970; Kim, 1975).
13
A reviewer has suggested that the effect of interpersonal skill requirements on anti-immigrant attitudes [may be] purely a function of their lack of
exposure to immigrant worker threat and that it is imperative to control for the percentage of foreign-born workers in respondents occupational category in
order to assess the true effect of ones level of relational skills on anti-immigrant sentiments. Therefore, we calculated the percentage of foreign-born in each
occupational category (ISCO 88) from the Current Population Survey March 2000 data and included it in our analysis.
276
robust standard errors instead of HLM models. As Kunovich (2013a) has found that individual-level variables explain much
of the variance in attitudes toward immigrants, we focus on estimating the effects of individual-level variables.
In this paper, we assess the detailed skill requirements on occupations through the DOT measures. We calculate the percentage of foreign-born in each occupational category (ISCO 88) from the Current Population Survey (CPS) March 2000 data
and merge with the General Social Survey (2004) data.14 Thus, for each job category (ISCO 88) in the General Social Survey
2004 module, we provide the percentage of foreign-born workers in that specic occupation.
3.5. Other control variables
3.5.1. Formal education
Formal education captures the individual-level human capital component (Becker, 1964), and has been the most signicant factor in explaining attitudes toward out-groups in previous studies (Quillian, 1995; Mayda, 2006; Hainmueller
and Hiscox, 2010). Highly educated individuals are more tolerant of the presence of ethnic or racial minorities, including
immigrants, in the neighborhood and national economies. Formal education is measured as the highest year of school completed for each respondent.
3.5.2. Cognitive skill complexity
In line with previous stratication research, this study includes occupation-specic cognitive skill complexity (Kilbourne
et al., 1994; Weeden, 2002) as one of the control variables. Following the previous studies (Kilbourne et al., 1994; Farkas
et al., 1997), we use ve DOT measures as components of this cognitive skill complexity: three components of general educational development in reasoning, math, and language (R, M, and L, respectively in Appendix A.2); specic vocational training
requirements (S); and skill requirement in relation to data (D).15 With the inclusion of the language-skill requirement in the
composite measure, interpersonal skill standards are expected to capture only the effects of non-cognitive social skill elements
on anti-immigrant sentiments.
3.5.3. Religious afliations
In our attempt to control for the effects of religion on anti-immigrant sentiments, we consider not only denomination but
also cultural conicts between orthodox/conservative Protestants and mainline/liberal Protestants. We assume that cultural
differences originating from respondents religious faiths (Hunter, 1994; Wuthnow, 1996) may shape their attitudes toward
immigrants in different ways.
On one hand, conservative Protestants, who tend to have a strong belief in the literal inerrancy of the Bible and an uncompromising moral view based on it, may consider the greater presence of immigrants with different cultural and religious
backgrounds as serious threats to their (uncompromising) religious doctrines and communities. They are more likely to presume that immigrants might disrupt their traditional fabrics of religious and cultural communities, not only by increasing
crime and job loss, but also by bringing different cultural and religious ideas and practices along with them. Therefore, conservative Protestants low tolerance for different religious and cultural practices is more likely to lead to greater
anti-immigrant sentiment. On the other hand, liberal Protestants may think that moral views and religious doctrines can
be compromised and updated along with changing community norms (Hunter, 1991), which may lead to higher level of
openness to immigrants presence and their values. Overall, we assume that, as both liberal Protestants and Catholics are
composed of very heterogeneous groups, their overall differences in opinions toward immigrants from non-religious populations may not be noticeable. Three indicator (0 or 1) variables for religious afliation, conservative Protestants, mainline
Protestants, and Catholics, are introduced with the reference category being no or other religions.
3.5.4. Race
We expect that racial differences may exist in attitudes towards immigrants due to the racialization of immigration since
the 1960s. Three categories of individual racial identication, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and others are
introduced. We use three indicator (0 or 1) variables to compare group differences in attitudes toward immigrants with
Latinos, the reference category.
3.5.5. Political afliation
Many social scientists have recently highlighted the effect of political afliation on anti-immigrant sentiments especially
in advanced industrial countries (Semyonov et al., 2006), as (extremist) right-wing parties often resort to stirring up xenophobic fear of foreigners to consolidate their electoral base. In this study, we control for political party identity by introducing an indicator variable (0 or 1) for Republican Party membership. Although some segments of Republicans may show
14
We deleted one occupational category (e.g. postmasters) in the General Social Survey (2004) data as this did not exist in the Current Population Survey
March 2000 data. Thus, the total number of occupational categories (ISCO 88) in the General Social Survey (2004) data changed from 161 to 160.
15
We also conducted conrmatory factor analyses of ve measures and identied appropriate factor loadings for these sub-indicators; 1.000 for reasoning,
1.063 for math, 1.112 for language, 1.438 for relation to data, 1.670 for specic vocational training (SVP). Fit statistics are as follows: p-value < 0.000; IFI = .987;
NFI = .986; TLI = .973; RMSEA = 0.133).
277
stronger feelings against immigrants, others may not. Especially controlling for fundamentalist Protestants, we do not expect
that republican membership will have statistically meaningful positive effects on anti-immigrant sentiments.
3.5.6. Other individual-level demographic variables
Sex is introduced as a component of the baseline model with an indicator (0 for men and 1 for women) variable, with the
expectation that men will show greater hostility toward out-group populations. With the expectation that older people are
expected to show more prejudice about out-group populations, age variable is also added as one of the controls. A group of
dummy variables are also introduced to control for individuals labor-market status: part-time employed, unemployed,
retired and non-employed (students, housewives, and disabled) are controlled for, with full-time employed being the reference category. Weaker status in the labor market is expected to be associated with stronger anti-immigrant sentiments. We
control for union membership to see if workers memberships with unions lead them to show stronger anti-immigrant sentiments, by using an indicator (0 or 1) variable for being a member of a union.
Finally, we control for respondents citizenship status. Respondents with citizenship are expected to show stronger
anti-immigrant sentiments, compared to those without citizenship, mostly, immigrants.16 Obviously, there will be an
unknown number of citizens who have recent immigration histories but also obtained citizenships after decades of residential
histories. We assume that this segment of the population is likely to have similar attitudes toward the recent immigrants similar
to those of native-born citizens, after having experienced a signicant process of assimilation.17
4. Method
We employ a linear regression (OLS) model using HuberWhite heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors (or robust
standard errors) for 160 occupational-level clusters, adjusting for within-cluster correlations. In this model, we assume that
respondents may be clustered into occupations and that observations may be correlated within each occupation, but would
be independent between occupational categories (Huber, 1967; White, 1980). In other words, the model allows off-diagonal
elements (in the error term) from the same cluster to be non-zero, while still maintaining the assumption that there is no
correlation among observations across clusters (Primo et al., 2007; 451). One may employ hierarchical linear modeling
(HLM; Bryk and Raudenbush, 1992; Raudenbush and Bryk, 2002) to take into account this kind of error structure, but we
choose to employ the HuberWhite estimator for the following two reasons: rst, we are not interested in decomposing (explained) variances into each level to know how much each level (of covariates) explains, which is the main concern of the
HLM models. What we want to know in this study is simply the point estimation of our main covariates and their statistical
signicance, with an appropriately specied error structure; second, the HuberWhite estimator is computationally less
intensive, as it does not require distributional assumptions for every level (Primo et al., 2007), which may impose heavy
demands on theory and data (Steenbergen and Jones, 2002, 234).18
5. Results
5.1. Descriptive results
Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the main variables including measures of relational and cognitive skill assets
for eight major occupational categories. The mean value of anti-immigrant sentiments is the highest for skilled machine
operators (2.99) and skilled craftsmen (2.93), while the lowest for professionals (2.35) and managers (2.53). Note that the
elementary unskilled, those who are at the lowest (cognitive) skill level, do not show the highest level of anti-immigrant
sentiment (2.80). The skilled craftsmen and machine operators, representative of manual working class occupations, have
one of the lowest interpersonal skill standards (1.76 and 2.01), and the highest instrumental skill standard (6.56 and
6.23), thereby showing the lowest relational skill specicity (.21 and .25). These descriptive statistics aggregated by large
occupational categories suggest that there may be a meaningfully strong negative association between relational skill specicity and anti-immigrant sentiment, which may also coincide with variations along occupational lines.
5.2. Multivariate results
Table 2 displays the unstandardized coefcients from linear regression models testing the effects of relational skill specicity, interpersonal skills, and instrumental skills on the percentage of foreign-born in occupations. Our ndings show that
16
As citizens with one or two immigrant parents (the second generation immigrants who hold citizenships) are more likely to support immigrants presence,
we alternatively tested both parents citizenship status instead of respondents citizenship status, expecting that individuals whose parents are both citizens,
will show stronger anti-immigrant sentiments, when compared to those with at least one parent without citizenship status. The results were largely similar to
the ones using simple citizenship. The results are available upon request.
17
We tested whether the exclusion of this group with recent immigration histories from the sample affects the estimates of the relational skill measures. The
results for this smaller sample (N = 929) are largely identical with the ones reported in the text. The results are available upon request.
18
Actually, some of the models using cross-levels and interactions did not converge under the MLE (maximum likelihood estimation). Nevertheless, we also
tested some basic multi-level models treating the occupation-level as a higher level (but not specifying varying slopes across units), which is equivalent to our
current models. The results were almost identical. Please see Appendix C.2 for the results using HLM models with 47 occupational groups.
278
Table 1
Descriptive statistics of key variables, by major occupational categories (ISCO 88): General Social Survey, 2004.
Occupational Categories
Ofcials/Managers
Professionals
Technicians
Clerks
Service/Sales Workers
Skilled Craftsmen & Agricultural and Fishery
Machine Operators
Elementary Unskilled
176
223
126
146
129
100
81
69
Anti-immigrant
sentiments
Cognitive skill
complexity
Interpersonal
skill standard
Instrumental
skill standard
Relational skill
specicity
Mean
Std dev.
Mean
Std dev.
Mean
Std dev.
Mean
Std dev.
Mean
Std dev.
2.51
2.35
2.63
2.76
2.78
2.94
2.98
2.81
0.64
0.72
0.81
0.64
0.78
0.75
0.84
0.78
7.05
7.47
6.43
4.29
3.60
5.48
4.18
1.75
0.32
0.61
0.58
0.82
1.20
0.85
1.16
0.32
8.00
5.35
3.51
2.16
2.47
1.78
2.01
1.46
0.00
2.46
1.51
0.99
0.91
0.98
1.01
0.83
1.00
3.17
2.96
5.62
2.55
6.58
6.25
1.00
0.00
2.71
2.67
1.32
2.06
1.20
1.44
0.00
0.89
0.65
0.60
0.28
0.54
0.21
0.25
0.56
0.00
0.25
0.24
0.11
0.19
0.09
0.12
0.10
Table 2
Regression results of the percentage of foreign-born in occupation against relational skill specicity, interpersonal skills, and instrumental skills in occupation.
Relational skill specicity in occupation
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
6.719**
(0.927)
7.264**
(0.899)
6.656**
(0.923)
Interpersonal skill in occupation
Model 4
Model 5
0.779**
(0.111)
0.700**
(0.115)
Instrumental skill in occupation

Cognitive skill complexity in occupation
Avg. years of education in occupation
Avg. log income in occupation
Avg. union membership in occupation
Avg.% of unemployed in occupation
Constant
N
R2
1.198**
(0.179)
0.455*
(0.194)
0.351
(0.505)
1.790
(1.693)
2.526
(2.495)
1.404**
(0.157)
0.036
(0.478)
2.197
(1.688)
2.877
(2.496)
25.54**
(4.321)
1076
0.212
24.53**
(4.308)
1076
0.208
1.161**
(0.171)
0.411*
(0.184)
1.082**
(0.173)
1.644
(1.680)
2.489
(2.494)
0.233
(0.479)
2.578
(1.706)
3.198
(2.513)
28.21**
(1.971)
1076
0.212
23.87**
(4.367)
1076
0.197
0.875**
(0.181)
0.468*
(0.185)
Model 6
Model 7
0.707**
(0.089)
1.719**
(0.156)
0.653**
(0.090)
1.416**
0.493**
(0.180)
2.005
(1.699)
2.776
(2.510)
0.156
(0.476)
1.561
(1.686)
1.946
(2.505)
1.015
(1.675)
1.560
(2.499)
26.59**
(2.056)
1076
0.201
21.11**
(4.392)
1076
0.207
24.92**
(2.087)
1076
0.212
Robust standard errors in parentheses.

Signicant at 10%.
*
Signicant at 5%.
**
Signicant at 1%.
Hypothesis 1-1, 2-1, and 3-1 hold across different model specications. Occupations with higher levels of relational skill
specicity and interpersonal skill requirements are more likely to have a lower percentage of foreign-born workers in the
occupation, controlling for cognitive skill complexity, average years of schooling, average log income, average percentage
of union membership, and average level of unemployment in each occupation.19 In contrast, occupations with higher instrumental skill standards are more likely to have a higher concentration of foreign-born workers in the occupation, ceteris paribus.
Thus, interpersonal skill standards may function as skill barriers limiting the entry of immigrant workers to certain
occupations.
Table 3 presents unstandardized coefcients from linear regression models with HuberWhite standard errors testing the
effects of measures of relational skills on anti-immigrant sentiments. Model 1 reveals that interpersonal skill asset has an
expected, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiment, in the presence of other individual-level covariates (Hypothesis
1-2). Interpersonal skills may facilitate a greater understanding of others through personality traits and also operate as a
skill barrier, insulating native workers from competition with immigrants. Model 2 shows that instrumental skill assets
has a strong positive effect on anti-immigrant sentiment (Hypothesis 2-2).We predicted that workers with higher levels
of instrumental skill may not only lack soft skills or relevant personality traits, but also feel more vulnerable to the risk
of unemployment and income loss, leading to strong anti-immigrant sentiments.
In Model 3, we test the effect of our main variable, relational skill specicity, on anti-immigrant sentiment, adjusting for
all individual-level baseline controls. As we predicted, the coefcient is negative and highly signicant. The result also lends
19
Average years of schooling in occupation and average log income in occupation are highly correlated (r = .64), and, therefore are not included in the same
model except for Model 1.
279

Table 3
Regression results of anti-immigrant sentiments against relational skill specicity (using HuberWhite robust standard errors).
Sex (Female = 1)
Age
Education
Part-time Employed
Unemployed
Retired
Non-employed
Fundamental Protestant
Mainline Protestant
Catholic
Non-Hispanic White
Non-Hispanic Black
Other (Non-Hispanic)
Citizenship
Republican
Union Membership
Interpersonal Skill
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
Model 4
0.048
(0.043)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.083**
(0.008)
0.009
(0.066)
0.065
(0.095)
0.020
(0.075)
0.057
(0.071)
0.158**
(0.058)
0.137*
(0.065)
0.084
(0.067)
0.512**
(0.085)
0.501**
(0.093)
0.004
(0.112)
0.463**
(0.122)
0.022
(0.048)
0.054
(0.083)
0.024**
(0.007)
0.048
(0.043)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.089**
(0.008)
0.013
(0.065)
0.065
(0.094)
0.006
(0.076)
0.074
(0.071)
0.150*
(0.059)
0.131*
(0.064)
0.084
(0.068)
0.517**
(0.085)
0.509**
(0.094)
0.013
(0.107)
0.486**
(0.117)
0.034
(0.047)
0.070
(0.082)
0.046
(0.043)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.083**
(0.008)
0.003
(0.066)
0.066
(0.093)
0.013
(0.076)
0.069
(0.071)
0.152**
(0.058)
0.135*
(0.064)
0.083
(0.068)
0.512**
(0.084)
0.500**
(0.092)
0.007
(0.109)
0.484**
(0.119)
0.033
(0.047)
0.059
(0.082)
0.041
(0.042)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.080**
(0.008)
0.004
(0.067)
0.064
(0.093)
0.013
(0.078)
0.065
(0.071)
0.154**
(0.058)
0.135*
(0.064)
0.082
(0.067)
0.512**
(0.084)
0.494**
(0.093)
0.003
(0.109)
0.487**
(0.118)
0.035
(0.046)
0.059
(0.082)
0.316**
(0.077)
0.288**
(0.088)
0.006
(0.014)
0.228
(0.298)
3.159**
(0.138)
0.189
3.100**
(0.146)
0.190
0.029**
(0.008)
Instrumental Skill
Relational Skill Specicity
Cognitive Skill Complexity
% Foreign-born in Rs Occupation
Constant
R2
3.104**
(0.141)
0.182
2.975**
(0.153)
0.187
N = 1055; Robust standard errors in parentheses.

Signicant at 10%.
*
Signicant at 5%.
**
Signicant at 1%.
credibility to the central argument (Hypothesis 3-2) of this study that a greater possession of interpersonal skills relative to
instrumental skills will lead to lower anti-immigrant sentiments. Model 4 tests whether the signicant effect of relational
skill specicity remains robust against the percentage of foreign-born in respondents occupation and cognitive skill complexity.20 Relational skill specicity is again highly signicant at the 1% level (b = .288). With the introduction of additional
variables, the effect of relational skill specicity has decreased moderately from Model 3 (b = .316), which implies that a part
20
In Appendix C.1, we separately test the effect of exposure to foreign-born workers in 160 occupations on anti-immigrant sentiments. In Model 1, without
relational skill specicity, the percentage of foreign-born in ones occupation has a signicant positive effect on anti-immigrant attitudes at the 10% level. This
positive effect disappears once relational skill specicity is introduced in Model 2. In Models 34, we combined adjacent occupations into ISCO 88s 28 larger
occupational categories. In Model 3, the percentage of foreign-born in ones broader occupational category has a signicant, positive effect on anti-immigrant
feelings at the 5% level, but this effect becomes non-signicant in Model 4 after adding relational skill specicity. Appendix C.2 shows the result from HLM
models using 47 occupational groups. To collapse 160 occupations into 47 larger categories, we split the 28 larger occupational categories (especially those
with more than 50 incumbents) and combined occupations in the similar category (according to ISCO88 categorization). In Model 1, the percentage of
foreign-born workers in occupations has a signicant positive effect on anti-immigrant sentiment at the 5% level. However, this signicant effect disappears
once relational skill specicity is introduced.
280
of relational skill specicity effects may have been mediated through exposure to foreign-born workers and cognitive skill complexity in ones occupation (but the effect is non-signicant).21 The nding shows that the effect of relational skill specicity
outweighs that of cognitive skill assets and the percentage of foreign-born in ones occupation, both of which do not have signicant effects on anti-immigrant feelings. Based on these results, we conclude that personality traits mechanism prevails over
labor market competition mechanism.22
Model 3 and 4 show the effects of the baseline control variables on anti-immigrant sentiment. Respondents sex and
labor-market status variables are not associated with anti-immigrant sentiment. Conservative Protestants are more likely
to have negative feelings towards immigrants, compared to other religious adherents, which supports the argument that
they will be less tolerant of out-groups different cultural and religious identities. Surprisingly, contrary to our
prediction, mainline Protestants are also more likely to exhibit stronger sentiments against immigrants, compared to
those with no or other religious afliations. The strong anti-immigrant sentiments held by mainline Protestants may
imply the division between the laity and the progressive clergy (Wuthnow, 1996). While the leadership of mainline
Protestants may be progressive and pro-immigrant, the followers may not exactly share the same views towards
immigrants.
Non-Hispanic white respondents hold more negative views towards immigrants, compared to Latino respondents.
Interestingly, non-Hispanic black respondents also show anti-immigrant sentiments as strong as white respondents. This
result suggests that black respondents consider themselves as incumbent majority-native insiders threatened by immigrants, rather than a part of minority groups, especially regarding the immigration issue. African-Americans stronger
anti-immigrant sentiment may be also attributable to their higher (perceived) group-level threats that originate from their
intense competition with immigrants in low-wage job markets. In addition, African-Americans may have a lower proportion
of (recent) immigrants than Latinos, the omitted category, which also means that their friends and relatives are less likely to
be immigrants. Therefore, non-Hispanic blacks lower chances of contact (Pettigrew, 1998) with immigrants inside their
own group are likely to lead to stronger anti-immigrant sentiments.
As expected, the effect of education has a highly signicant, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiment. This variable is
the single most dominant predictor of attitudes toward immigrants. The result simply signies that the more educated an
individual is, the less threatened or less prejudiced one is likely to be. The more educated are supportive of the presence of
immigrants, because they have had the chance to absorb more valuable sources of information regarding immigrants positive roles in industry and society. Respondents who are legal citizens are likely to have stronger anti-immigrant sentiments,
compared to those without citizenship, as they may perceive themselves more as insiders against immigrants. Contrary to
our expectations, older people are less likely to exhibit negative attitudes toward immigrants, net of economic self-interest.
Being a Republican or a union member does not have a statistically signicant effect on anti-immigrant sentiment. The
non-signicant effect of Republican Party membership is not surprising as mixed attitudes toward immigrants often coexist
within the same political party. Unions stances on immigration also vary by industries, and thus it may be difcult to nd a
consistent relationship between union membership and sentiments toward immigrants.
The result overall offers sufcient support to our argument. Workers possessing greater interpersonal skills relative to
instrumental skills are more likely to possess soft skills or personality traits that enhance their capacity to relate to the
situation of others, and also less likely to suffer from erce competitions with immigrants (thanks to relatively high interpersonal skill barriers). Therefore, workers with higher relational skill specicity are less likely to express strong
anti-immigrant sentiments. However, the fact that relational skill specicity is still highly signicant, after controlling for
the percentage of foreign-born in ones occupation (which has a non-signicant effect), implies that the direct effect of relational skill specicity outweighs the indirect effect. In short, we conclude that the direct pathway through personality traits
prevails over the indirect pathway through the exposure to competition with immigrants in occupations.
Table 4 shows the results from ordered logit models for four separate dependent variables. In order to nd out whether
results differ by each question, we analyzed the four outcome variables separately using random intercept proportional odds
models. There are no signicant differences in results between using the composite-index and using the individual outcomes. Relational skill specicity has a signicant, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiments across three models
(a = .01 level), except for the question, immigrants are good for economy, where it is only marginally signicant at the
10% level. We also nd that, contrary to our prediction, fundamentalist Protestants focus more on the economic aspect of
immigration while mainline Protestants express concern on the cultural aspect of immigration. Conservative Protestants
are more likely to think that immigrants are not good for the economy (a = .01 level), and that immigrants take jobs away
from natives (a = .05 level), compared to those with other religious beliefs. On the other hand, they are only marginally more
likely to view that immigrants improve society by bringing new ideas (a = .10 level). Mainline Protestants, in contrast, are
less likely to think that immigrants improve society by bringing in new ideas (a = .01 level), and marginally more likely
to think that immigrants increase crime (a = .10 level).
21
Following Reviewers suggestion, we ran structural equation models (SEM) and Sobel tests. Both results show that the indirect effect of relational skill
specicity through the percentage of foreign-born in occupations is not signicant.
22
As we do not have concrete measures of personality traits other than interpersonal and instrumental skills, we do not know exactly how much variations
are attributable to one or the other mechanism between personality traits and labor market competition. Personality traits effects may have absorbed labor
market competition effects, or there may, indeed, be no labor market competition effect. At this point, the SEM result lends credence to the latter scenario.
281
Table 4
Regression results from multi-level ordered logit models of four separate areas of anti-immigrant sentiments against relational skill assets (using HuberWhite
robust standard errors).
Immigrants
Increase Crimea
Sex (Female = 1)
Age
Education
Part-time Employed
Unemployed
Retired
Non-employed
Fundamentalist Protestant
Mainline Protestant
Catholic
Non-Hispanic White
Non-Hispanic Black
Other (non-Hispanic)
Citizenship
Republican
Union Membership
Cut1
Relational Skill
Specicity
Constant
Cut2
Constant
Cut3
Constant
Cut4
Constant
Log pseudo likelihood
0.294*
(0.125)
0.002
(0.005)
0.141**
(0.024)
0.033
(0.151)
0.084
(0.229)
0.234
(0.214)
0.098
(0.162)
0.150
(0.141)
0.332+
(0.176)
0.231
(0.164)
0.514*
(0.236)
0.303
(0.273)
0.326
(0.344)
0.105
(0.359)
0.136
(0.127)
0.180
(0.240)
0.703**
(0.223)
4.488**
(0.613)
2.107**
(0.591)
0.763
(0.587)
0.843
(0.574)
1461.76
Immigrants Good
for Economy
Immigrants Take
Jobs Awaya
0.136
(0.112)
0.020**
(0.005)
0.156**
(0.024)
0.065
(0.173)
0.340
(0.225)
0.103
(0.197)
0.063
(0.172)
0.397**
(0.154)
0.179
(0.176)
0.235
(0.184)
1.209**
(0.237)
1.213**
(0.268)
0.019
(0.354)
1.571**
(0.387)
0.029
(0.143)
0.145
(0.189)
0.404+
(0.212)
3.322**
(0.547)
0.606
(0.481)
0.869+
(0.486)
2.855**
(0.514)
1365.44
0.131
(0.119)
0.008*
(0.0042)
0.182**
(0.025)
0.203
(0.168)
0.326
(0.246)
0.017
(0.226)
0.270
(0.210)
0.341*
(0.147)
0.202
(0.169)
0.007
(0.171)
1.245**
(0.229)
1.362**
(0.262)
0.352
(0.381)
1.424**
(0.322)
0.085
(0.122)
0.066
(0.228)
0.642**
(0.184)
3.686**
(0.435)
1.400**
(0.421)
0.346
(0.431)
1.496**
(0.435)
1476.91
Immigrants Improve
Society/New Ideas
0.037
(0.108)
0.006
(0.005)
0.198**
(0.023)
0.108
(0.155)
0.044
(0.234)
0.301
(0.206)
0.121
(0.178)
0.290+
(0.165)
0.466**
(0.178)
0.279
(0.185)
0.989**
(0.258)
1.151**
(0.311)
0.10
(0.435)
1.028*
(0.478)
0.299*
(0.126)
0.059
(0.205)
0.746**
(0.229)
3.611**
(0.606)
0.917
(0.579)
0.446
(0.584)
2.441**
(0.602)
1324.66
N = 1055; Robust standard errors in parentheses.

Signicant at 10%.
*
Signicant at 5%.
**
Signicant at 1%.
a
Response categories are rescaled to assign higher scores to stronger sentiments against immigrants.
Education has a negative effect on all four outcome variable, so that those who are more educated are less likely to hold
negative views on immigrants. Compared to Latino respondents, non-Hispanic Whites have higher degrees of negative attitudes toward immigrants in all four aspects, while non-Hispanic Blacks are more negative in all areas except for increasing
crime. Citizens are more likely to have unfavorable views towards immigrants regarding all three aspects (immigrants are
good for economy, immigrants take jobs away, and immigrants improve society), but not for increasing crime.
Republicans are more likely to disagree that immigrants improve society culturally (a = .05 level). Females are less likely
to believe that immigrants increase crime rates (a = .05 level), while older people, contrary to our prediction, are less likely
to think that immigrants take away jobs and are not good for the economy.
6. Conclusion
This study attempted to highlight the role of relational dimensions of occupational skills in explaining anti-immigrant
sentiment. We initially constructed two dimensions of relational skill assets: interpersonal and instrumental skill assets
at occupational level. We conceptualized the former as less culturally convertible and the latter as more portable across societies. I inspired by the recent VoC schools emphasis on the role of skill asset portability/specicity (Hall and Soskice, 2001;
282
Iversen and Soskice, 2001), we developed a new variable, relational skill specicity, utilizing the above two measures. Our
central claim is that higher relational skill specicity (e.g. higher the ratio of interpersonal skills relative to the sum of instrumental and interpersonal skill assets) will be associated with less job market competition with immigrants and greater capacity to relate to the situation of others, and, thus, produce less negative feelings toward immigrants.
In building the causal explanation between relational skill specicity and anti-immigrant sentiment, we primarily focused
on the long-term developmental processes of non-cognitive skills (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) and their inconvertibility across
different societies. This paper has proposed two causal paths: (1) labor market competition and labor supply; and (2) personality traits or soft skills formulated before and through occupational training. First, relational skill specicity may indirectly
shape native workers attitudes toward immigrants by determining the exposure to labor market competition with immigrants
(e.g. the percentage of foreign-born workers in occupations). Our hypothesis is that relational skill specicity will capture the
degree of convertibility of skills across different cultures and societies, which will eventually affect the intensity of competition
in the occupation-specic labor markets, leading to positive or negative feelings toward immigrants. Second, relational skill
specicity may also directly affect anti-immigrant sentiments. Relational skills for occupational tasks tend to be correlated with
personality traits or soft skills (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; John and Srivastava, 1999), such as openness, cooperativeness, and
tender-mindedness, that enable a favorable understanding of immigrants situations and their contribution to the host
society.
Overall, the ndings of this study impressively support our argument that relational skills play an important role in
accounting for citizens attitudes toward immigrants as well as the composition of foreign-born workers in occupations.
Coefcients of relational skill specicity remained highly signicant and robust against different specications, while
controlling for predominantly strong factors such as individual-level education, citizenship status, cognitive skill variables
as well as demographic, religious and political variables. Relational skills specicity has a direct, negative effect on
anti-immigrant sentiments, which persists after controlling for the extent of exposure to foreign-born workers in ones
occupations. In summary, we conclude that the direct causal pathway of relational skill specicity (through
personality traits) overweighs the indirect pathway (through labor market competition and labor supply).
These ndings advance our understanding of occupation-based social stratication processes, ethnic competition in the
labor market, and attitudinal studies of race and minorities. Although previous scholarship has underscored the importance of cognitive skill assets in migration processes and attitudes toward immigration and out-group populations, the
importance of relational skills has not received much attention. We nd that the ndings of this study may provide a novel pathway of causal explanation of how native individual workers develop their anti-immigrant sentiments, along the
line of group threat theory (Blalock, 1967; Blumer, 1958; Bobo, 1983; Quillian, 1995).
Group threat theory posits that each native individual worker should have a priori membership with a dominant group (a
majority ethnic/racial group) and be exposed to direct competitions with immigrants in their local residential settings or
labor markets. Our study has shown how perceived threats are formulated from a combinational process of individuals
non-cognitive skills (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) and economic vulnerability (Bonacich, 1972; Borjas and Tienda, 1987), operating through occupational skill closures, as well as the capacity to understand others situation. Therefore, our theory and
ndings extend the applicability of the logic of group-threat theory to occupational boundaries beyond conventional
racial/ethnic boundaries. The notion of relational skill specicity enriches group-threat theory by illuminating how the
origin of prejudice toward out-group populations is not only based on racial/ethnic groupings, but also individuals skill
assets formed along occupational lines.
This study has some limitations that need to be addressed. First, the heterogeneity of immigrants and their labor market
experiences is not fully taken into consideration. Depending on the year of entry, country of origin, and destination, each
immigrant may not only have a different composition of skill assets, but also face widely varying labor market situations
in the host society. Second, this paper does not fully explicate why the indirect effect of relational skill specicity through
the proportion of immigrants in occupations is non-signicant. However, it is important to note that having a higher percentage of foreign-born workers in ones occupation can lead to both positive and negative feelings toward immigrants.
While native workers may feel threat due to increased competition, they may also develop solidarity with immigrant
co-workers. Other factors, such as the geographic concentration of immigrants, the gap between actual and perceived group
size, and the absence of measures of direct contact with immigrants (Kunovich, 2013a), further complicate the issue. Future
research may employ rich datasets on immigrant populations to investigate the relationship between occupational skills and
labor market outcomes.
Anti-immigrant sentiment may be partly a combinational product of inadvertently evolved, macro-level occupational segmentation, global movements and reconguration of labor forces, and individuals strategic responses to changing
labor-market situations. In the recent debates of immigration reforms, the Obama administration has expressed an interest
to open the doors for more high-skilled immigrants, especially in the tech sectors. What would this entail for the native citizens
attitudes toward immigrants? On one hand, the general public may view immigrants more favorably with the increase in the
number of high-skilled professionals. On the other hand, professionals with high levels of relational skill specicity may feel
threatened by the inux of high-skilled foreign-born workers, but, at the same time, may exhibit positive attitudes toward
immigrants because they are better able to understand others situations.23
23
Thus, we may predict constant/stable anti-immigrant sentiments among professionals despite an increase in the number of high-skilled immigrants.
283
An increasing number of immigrants in a society shake the structure of nativity that has been formulated over a long
course of time. Immigrants will try to nd cracks and rooms to carve out their own occupational niches in receiving societies, despite being constrained by their cognitive and non-cognitive skill assets, while natives also build their own defensive mechanisms to maintain the inherited institutions. Those may include educational credentials, occupational skill
complexity, and more importantly, interpersonal or social skills specic to the cultural sensitivities of the host country.
This study suggests that occupation-specic compositions of relational skill assets may be one of those criteria which both
native and immigrant workers utilize in order to maintain or secure their spaces in the labor market and social
hierarchies.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Edward Laumann, Kazuo Yamaguchi and John Levi Martin for their insightful comments and critiques.
We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Social Science Research who have provided helpful comments on
earlier versions of this paper.
Appendix A
A.1. Summary statistics
Variables
Mean
SD
Minimum
Maximum
Anti-immigrant Sentiment Composite Index

Sex (Female = 1)
Age
Education
Part time
Unemployed
Retired
Non-employed
Conservative Protestants
Mainline Protestants
Catholics
Non-Hispanic White
Non-Hispanic Black
Non-Hispanic Others
Latino
Citizenship
Republican
Union membership
Cognitive skill complexity
Interpersonal skill
Instrumental skill
Relational skill asset specicity
% Foreign-born in Rs occupation
2.65
.56
45.17
13.97
.11
.08
.14
.13
.26
.14
.24
.75
.13
.03
.09
.96
.40
.10
5.53
3.92
3.45
.54
.12
.76
.50
15.90
2.75
.32
.26
.35
.34
.44
.35
.43
.43
.33
.18
.28
.19
.49
.31
1.90
2.65
2.68
.28
.09
0.94
0
18
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1.26
1
1
.11
0
4.70
1
89
20
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
8.50
9
8
.90
.61
284
A.2. Correlation coefcients among key independent and dependent variables

AS
Anti-Immigrant Sentiments (AS)
(Composite Index)
Reasoning Development (R) (Component
for Cog. Complexity)
Math Development (M) (Component for
Cog. Complexity)
Language Development (L) (Component
for Cog. Complexity)
Specic Vocational Preparation (S)
(Component for Cog. Complexity)
Relation to Data (D) (Component for
Cog. Complexity)
Cognitive Skill Complexity (Comp)
(Composite Index)
Interpersonal Skill Standard (P)
(Relation to People)
Instrumental Skill Standard (T) (Relation
to Things)
Relational Skill Specicity II (RSII)a
(Standardized)
Comp
RSII
1.00
0.20
1.00
0.18
0.87
1.00
0.22
0.93
0.86
1.00
0.84
0.85
0.16
0.17
0.89
0.85
0.80
0.83
1.00
0.83
1.00
0.19
0.95
0.91
0.93
0.96
0.93
1.00
0.20
0.62
0.45
0.60
0.53
0.58
0.59
0.03
0.02
0.26
0.32
0.12
0.19
0.09
0.38
0.02
0.23
0.15
0.43
0.02
0.33
1.00
0.50
1.00
0.80
0.89
1.00
a
Z-scores of P and T were constructed separately, and then 2.58 were added to make both scales bigger than 0. Then, the specicity formula, pj/(tj + pj),
was used to generate the specicity score (RSII).
Appendix B. Detailed denitions of worker functions: interpersonal and instrumental skill standards.a
Scores
Interpersonal skill standards (relation to peopleb)
Instrumental skill standards (relation to thingsc)
Taking instructions-helping: Attending to the work

assignment instructions or orders of supervisor. (No
immediate response required unless clarication of
instructions or orders is needed.) Helping applies to
non-learning helpers
Serving: Attending to the needs or requests of people
or animals or the expressed or implicit wishes of
people. Immediate response is involved
Handling: Using body members, handtools, and/or

special devices to work, move, or carry objects or
materials. Involves little or no latitude for judgment
with regard to attainment of standards or in selecting
appropriate tool, object, or materials
Feeding-offbearing: Inserting, throwing, dumping, or
placing materials in or removing them from machines
or equipment which are automatic or tended or
operated by other workers
Tending: Starting, stopping, and observing the
functioning of machines and equipment. Involves
adjusting materials or controls of the machine, such as
changing guides, adjusting timers and temperature
gauges, turning valves to allow ow of materials, and
ipping switches in response to lights. Little judgment
is involved in making these adjustments
Manipulating: Using body members, tools, or special
devices to work, move, guide, or place objects or
materials. Involves some latitude for judgment with
regard to precision attained and selecting appropriate
tool, object, or material, although this is readily
manifest
Driving-operating: Starting, stopping, and controlling
the action of machines or equipment for which a
Speaking-signaling: Talking with and/or signaling

people to convey or exchange information. Includes
giving assignments and/or directions to helpers or
assistants
Persuading: Inuencing others in favor of a product,

service, or point of view
Diverting: Amusing others, usually through the

medium of stage, screen, television, or radio
285
Detailed denitions of worker functions: interpersonal and instrumental skill standards.a (continued)
Scores
Interpersonal skill standards (relation to peopleb)
Supervising: Determining or interpreting work

procedures for a group of workers, assigning specic
duties to them, maintaining harmonious relations
among them, and promoting efciency. A variety of
responsibilities is involved in this function
Instructing: Teaching subject matter to others, or

training others (including animals) through
explanation, demonstration, and supervised practice;
or making recommendations on the basis of technical
disciplines
Negotiating: Exchanging ideas, information, and

opinions with others to formulate policies and
programs and/or arrive jointly at decisions,
conclusions, or solutions
Mentoring: Dealing with individuals in terms of their

total personality in order to advise, counsel, and/or
guide them with regard to problems that may be
resolved by legal, scientic, clinical, spiritual, and/or
other professional principles
Instrumental skill standards (relation to thingsc)

course must be steered or which must be guided to
control the movement of things or people for a variety
of purposes. Involves such activities as observing
gauges and dials, estimating distances and
determining speed and direction of other objects,
turning cranks and wheels, and pushing or pulling
gear lifts or levers. Includes such machines as cranes,
conveyor systems, tractors, furnace-charging
machines, paving machines, and hoisting machines.
Excludes manually powered machines, such as
handtrucks and dollies, and power-assisted machines,
such as electric wheelbarrows and handtrucks
Precision working: Using body members and/or tools
or work aids to work, move, guide, or place objects or
materials in situations where ultimate responsibility
for the attainment of standards occurs and selection of
appropriate tools, objects, or materials, and the
adjustment of the tool to the task require exercise of
considerable judgment
Setting up: Preparing machines (or equipment) for
operation by planning order of successive machine
operations, installing and adjusting tools and other
machine components, adjusting the position of
workpiece or material, setting controls, and verifying
accuracy of machine capabilities, properties of
materials, and shop practices. Uses tools, equipment,
and work aids, such as precision gauges and
measuring instruments. Workers who setup one or a
number of machines for other workers or who setup
and personally operate a variety of machines are
included here
Operating-Controlling: Starting, stopping, controlling,
and adjusting the progress of machines or equipment.
Operating machines involves setting up and adjusting
the machine or material(s) as the work progresses.
Controlling involves observing gauges, dials, etc. and
turning valves and other devices to regulate factors
such as temperature, pressure, ow of liquids, speed of
pumps, and reactions of materials
The entire table was excerpted from Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1991), pp. 10051014.
People: Human beings; also animals dealt with on an individual basis as if they were human.
c
Things: Inanimate objects as distinguished from human beings, substances or materials; and machines, tools, equipment, work aids, and products. A
thing is tangible and has shape, form, and other physical characteristics.
b
286
Appendix C
C.1. Anti-immigrant sentiments against percentage of foreign-born and relational skill specicity (using HuberWhite robust
standard errors)
Clustered in 160
occupations
Sex
Age
Education
Part-time Employed
Unemployed
Retired
Non-employed
Mainline Protestant
Catholic
Non-Hispanic White
Non-Hispanic Black
Other (Non-Hispanic)
Citizenship
Republican
Union Membership
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
Model 4
0.045
(0.043)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.088**
(0.008)
0.001
(0.065)
0.068
(0.095)
0.004
(0.074)
0.065
(0.070)
0.158**
(0.058)
0.132*
(0.065)
0.085
(0.068)
0.520**
(0.087)
0.500**
(0.095)
0.008
(0.110)
0.472**
(0.119)
0.030
(0.047)
0.072
(0.084)
0.040
(0.042)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.082**
(0.008)
0.001
(0.066)
0.064
(0.093)
0.010
(0.077)
0.068
(0.072)
0.153**
(0.058)
0.134*
(0.064)
0.082
(0.067)
0.513**
(0.084)
0.496**
(0.092)
0.004
(0.109)
0.489**
(0.118)
0.035
(0.046)
0.061
(0.082)
0.293**
(0.084)
0.259
(0.298)
0.043
(0.041)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.086**
(0.010)
0.002
(0.096)
0.071
(0.087)
0.008
(0.053)
0.064
(0.047)
0.161+
(0.082)
0.136+
(0.068)
0.086
(0.083)
0.513**
(0.089)
0.498**
(0.088)
0.005
(0.103)
0.463**
(0.138)
0.025
(0.062)
0.062
(0.088)
0.040
(0.042)
0.004*
(0.002)
0.081**
(0.011)
0.001
(0.093)
0.066
(0.086)
0.012
(0.053)
0.067
(0.049)
0.154+
(0.084)
0.136*
(0.065)
0.083
(0.084)
0.510**
(0.085)
0.495**
(0.084)
0.006
(0.101)
0.484**
(0.137)
0.033
(0.060)
0.057
(0.084)
0.287**
(0.067)
0.751*
(0.318)
0.358
(0.323)
2.958**
(0.193)
1055
0.181
3.065**
(0.189)
1055
0.190

% Foreign-born in Rs Occupations
Clustered in 28 large
occupation categories
0.528+
(0.280)
% Foreign-born in Rs 28 Larger Occ. Categories

Constant
N
R-squared
+
p < 0.1.
*
p < 0.05.
**
p < 0.01.
3.009**
(0.151)
1055
0.180
3.087**
(0.148)
1055
0.190
287
C.2. Anti-immigrant sentiments against percentage of foreign-born and relational skill specicity in 47 large occupational groups
(using HLM models)
HLM models in 47 large occupational groups
Model 1
Individual level
Sex
Age
Education
Part-time Employed
Unemployed
Retired
Non-employed
Mainline Protestant
Catholic
White (Non-hispanic)
Black (Non-hispanic)
Other (Non-hispanic)
Citizenship Status
Republican
Union Membership
0.0500
(0.0457)
0.0039*
(0.0017)
0.086**
(0.0086)
0.00504
(0.0697)
0.0692
(0.0834)
0.0103
(0.0792)
0.0617
(0.0678)
0.162**
(0.0576)
0.136+
(0.0696)
0.0861
(0.0593)
0.516**
(0.0819)
0.504**
(0.0987)
0.00862
(0.139)
0.468**
(0.118)
0.0283
(0.0467)
0.0593
(0.0713)
0.0393
(0.0446)
0.0038*
(0.0017)
0.082**
(0.0086)
0.00704
(0.0693)
0.0634
(0.0832)
0.0123
(0.0786)
0.0593
(0.0675)
0.156**
(0.0575)
0.135+
(0.0694)
0.0847
(0.0591)
0.511**
(0.0816)
0.500**
(0.0983)
0.00138
(0.138)
0.476**
(0.117)
0.0292
(0.0466)
0.0577
(0.0708)
0.695*
(0.338)
2.961**
(0.196)
0.470
0.00312
0.00658
2204
1055
0.267**
(0.0899)
0.342
(0.334)
3.077**
(0.196)
0.469
1.12e 07
2.38e 07
2196
1055
Occupation group-level
% Foreign-born in 47 Occ groups
Constant
Level 1 variance
Level 2 variance
Intraclass correlation
Chi-square
N
+
p < 0.1.
*
p < 0.05.
**
p < 0.01.
Model 2
288
References
Acemoglu, Daron, Pischke, Jorn-Steffen, 1999. The structure of wages and investment in general training. J. Polit. Econ. 107 (3), 539572.
Aguilera, Michael B., Massey, Douglas S., 2003. Social capital and the wages of Mexican migrants: new hypotheses and tests. Soc. Forces 82, 671701.
Becker, Gary, 1964. Human Capital. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Blalock, Hubert M., 1967. Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. Wiley, New York.
Blumer, Herbert, 1958. Race prejudice as a sense of group relation. Pac. Sociol. Rev. 1, 37.
Bobo, Lawrence, 1983. Whites opposition to busing: symbolic racism or realistic group conict? J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 45, 11961210.
Bobo, Lawrence, Hutchings, Vicent L., 1996. Perceptions of racial group competition: extending Blumers theory of group position to a multiracial social
context. Am. Sociol. Rev. 61, 951972.
Bollen, Kenneth A., 1989. Structural Equations with Latent Variables. Wiley, New York.
Bonacich, Edna, 1972. A theory of ethnic antagonism: the split labor market. Am. Sociol. Rev. 37, 547559.
Borjas, George J., Tienda, Marta, 1987. The economic consequences of immigration. Science 235, 645651.
Borjas, G.J., Freeman, R.B., Katz, L.F., DiNardo, J., Abowd, J.M., 1997. How much do immigration and trade affect labor market outcomes? Brookings Pap. Econ.
Activity 1997 (1), 190.
Bowles, Samuel, Gintis, Herbert, 1976. Schooling in capitalist america: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books, New York.
Bowles, Samuel, Gintis, Herbert, 2002. Schooling in capitalist america revisited. Sociol. Educ. 75, 118.
Bowles, Samuel, Gintis, Herbert, Osborne, Melissa, 2001. Incentive-enhancing preferences: personality, behavior and earnings. Am. Econ. Rev. 91, 155158.
Bryk, Anthony S., Raudenbush, Stephan W., 1992. Hierarchical Linear Models in Social and Behavioral Research: Applications and Data Analysis Methods.
Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA.
Cain, Pamela S., Treiman, Donald J., 1981. The dictionary of occupational titles as a source of occupational data. Am. Sociol. Rev. 46, 253278.
Coleman, James S., 1988. Social capital in the creation of human capital. Am. J. Sociol. 94, S95S120.
Cranford, Cynthia J., 2005. Networks of exploitation: immigrant labor and the restructuring of the los angeles janitorial industry. Soc. Probl. 52, 379397.
Espenshade, Thomas J., Hempstead, Katherine, 1996. Contemporary American attitudes toward U.S. immigration. Int. Migr. Rev. 30, 535570.
Estevez-Abe, Margarita, Iversen, Torben, Soskice, David, 2001. Social protection and the formation of skills: a reinterpretation of the welfare state. In: Hall,
Peter, Soskice, David (Eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press, New York.
Farkas, George, 2003. Cognitive skills and non-cognitive traits and behaviors in stratication process. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 29, 541562.
Farkas, George, England, Paula, Vicknair, Keven, Kilbourne, Barbara Stanek, 1997. Cognitive skill, skill demands of jobs, and earnings among young European
American, African American... more. Soc. Forces 75, 913938.
Fligstein, Neil, 1997. Social skill and institutional theory. Am. Behav. Sci. 40, 397405.
Hainmueller, Jens, Hiscox, Michael J., 2010. Attitudes toward highly skilled and low-skilled immigration: evidence from a survey experiment. Am. Polit. Sci.
Rev. 104, 6184.
Hall, Peter, Soskice, David, 2001. An introduction to varieties of capitalism. In: Hall, P., Soskice, D. (Eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional
Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press, New York.
Heckman, James J., Kautz, Tim, 2012. Hard evidence on soft skills. Labour Econ. 19, 451464.
Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., 1982. Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar. Russell Sage Foundation/American Bar Foundation, New York.
Huber, Peter J., 1967. The behavior of maximum likelihood estimates under nonstandard conditions. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on
Mathematical Statistics and Probability. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Hunter, James D., 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Dene America. BasicBooks, New York.
Hunter, James D., 1994. Before The Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in Americas Culture War. Free Press, Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Maxwell
Macmillan International, New York, Toronto, New York.
Iversen, Torben, Soskice, David, 2001. An asset theory of social policy preferences. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 95, 875893.
John, Oliver P., Srivastava, Sanjay, 1999. The big-ve trait taxonomy: history, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In: Pervin, L.A., John, O.P. (Eds.),
Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. The Guilford Press, New York, pp. 102138.
Kilbourne, Barbara Stanek, Farkas, George, Beron, Kurt, Weir, Dorothea, England, Paula, 1994. Returns to skill, compensating differentials, and gender bias:
effects of occupational characteristics on the wages of white women and men. Am. J. Sociol. 100, 689719.
Kim, Jae-On, 1975. Multivariate analysis of ordinal variables. Am. J. Sociol. 81, 261298.
Kunovich, Robert M., 2004. Social structural position and prejudice. an exploration of cross-national differenced in regression slopes. Soc. Sci. Res. 33, 2044.
Kunovich, Robert M., 2013a. Labor market competition and anti-immigrant sentiment: occupations as contexts. Int. Migr. Rev. 47, 643685.
Kunovich, Robert M., 2013b. Anti-immigrant sentiment and occupational context: an examination of multilevel model estimates when samples are small.
ASK Res. Meth. 22, 536.
Labovitz, Sanford, 1970. The assignment of numbers to rank order categories. Am. Sociol. Rev. 35, 515524.
Lareau, Annette, 2002. Invisible inequality: social class and childrearing in black families and white families. Am. Sociol. Rev. 67, 747776.
Li, Peter, 2004. Social capital and economic outcomes for immigrants and ethnic minorities. J. Int. Migr. Integrat. 5, 171190.
Li, Peter, 2008. The role of foreign credentials and ethnic ties in immigrants economic performance. Can. J. Sociol., 33
Liu, Yujia, Grusky, David B., 2013. The payoff to skill in the third industrial revolution. Am. J. Sociol. 118, 13301374.
Mares, Isabela, 2003. The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Martin, John Levi, 2003. What is a eld theory? Am. J. Sociol. 109, 149.
Mayda, Anna Maria, 2006. Who is against immigration? A cross-country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigration. Rev. Econ. Stat. 88, 510
530.
Moss, Philip, Tilly, Chris, 1996. Soft skills and race: an investigation of black mens employment problems. Work Occupat. 23, 252276.
Nakhaie, M., 2007. Ethnoracial origins, social capital, and earnings. J. Int. Migr. Integrat. 8, 307325.
Neal, Derek, 1995. Industry-specic human capital: evidence from displaced workers. J. Labor Econ. 13 (4), 653677.
Neal, Derek, 2000. Industry-specic capital and the wage prole: evidence from the national longitudinal survey of youth and the panel study of income
dynamics. J. Labor Econ. 18 (2), 306323.
Ness, Immanuel, 2005. Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
ORourke, Kevin H., Sinnott, Richard, 2006. The determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration. Eur. J. Polit. Econ. 22, 838861.
Pettigrew, Thomas F., 1998. Intergroup contact theory. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 49, 6585.
Portes, Alejandro, McLeod Jr., Samuel A., Parker, Robert N., 1978. Immigrant aspiration. Sociol. Educ. 51, 241260.
Primo, David M., Jacobsmeier, Matthew L., Milyo, Jeffrey, 2007. Estimating the impact of state policies and institutions with mixed-level data. State Polit.
Policy Quart. 7 (4), 446459.
Quillian, Lincoln, 1995. Prejudice as a response to perceived group threat: population composition and anti-immigrant and racial prejudice in Europe. Am.
Sociol. Rev. 60, 586611.
Raudenbush, Stephan W., Bryk, Anthony S., 2002. Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods, second ed. Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
Reitz, Jeffrey, 2001. Immigrant skill utilization in the canadian labour market: implications of human capital research. J. Int. Migr. Integrat. 2, 347378.
Scheve, Kenneth F., Slaughter, Matthew J., 2001. Labor market competition and individual preferences over immigration policy. Rev. Econ. Stat. 83, 133145.
Semyonov, Moshe, Raijman, Rebeca, Yom-Tov, Anat., 2002. Labor market competition, perceived threat, and endorsement of economic discrimination
against foreign workers in Israel. Soc. Probl. 49, 416431.
289
Semyonov, Moshe, Raijman, Rebeca, Gorodzeisky, Anastasia, 2006. The rise of anti-foreigner sentiment in European Societies, 19882000. Am. Sociol. Rev.
71, 426449.
Steenbergen, Marco R., Jones, Bradford S., 2002. Modeling multilevel data structures. Am. J. Polit. Sci. 46 (1), 218237.
U.S. Department of Labor, Employment, and Training Administration. 1991. Dictionary of Occupational Titles. fourth ed. <http://www.oalj.dol.gov/PUBLIC/
DOT/REFERENCES/DOTPARTS.HTM>.
Waldinger, Roger David, Lichter, Michael Ira, 2003. How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor. University of California
Press, Berkeley, Calif.
Weeden, Kim A., 2002. Why do some occupations pay more than others? Social closure and earnings inequality in the United States. Am. J. Sociol. 108, 55
101.
White, Halbert, 1980. A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity. Econometrica J. Econom. Soc. 48,
817838.
Wuthnow, Robert, 1996. Christianity and Civil Society: The Contemporary Debate, vol. 1996. Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, Pa.

Relational Skill Assets and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Relational Skill Assets and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Social Science Research

Relational skill assets and anti-immigrant sentiments

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

2.1. Interpersonal skills and anti-immigrant sentiments

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

Beer able to relate to others situaons

Percentage of ForeignBorn in Occupaon

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

Relational skill specicity in occupation

Interpersonal skill in occupation

Instrumental skill in occupation

Robust standard errors in parentheses.

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N = 1055; Robust standard errors in parentheses.

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N = 1055; Robust standard errors in parentheses.

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

Anti-immigrant Sentiment Composite Index

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

A.2. Correlation coefcients among key independent and dependent variables

Interpersonal skill standards (relation to peopleb)

Instrumental skill standards (relation to thingsc)

Taking instructions-helping: Attending to the work

Handling: Using body members, handtools, and/or

Speaking-signaling: Talking with and/or signaling

Persuading: Inuencing others in favor of a product,

Diverting: Amusing others, usually through the

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

Interpersonal skill standards (relation to peopleb)

Supervising: Determining or interpreting work

Instructing: Teaching subject matter to others, or

Negotiating: Exchanging ideas, information, and

Mentoring: Dealing with individuals in terms of their

Instrumental skill standards (relation to thingsc)

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

Relational Skill Specicity

% Foreign-born in Rs 28 Larger Occ. Categories

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270289

You might also like