Being Sent Where Immigrants Live Makes Missionaries More Pro-Immigrant

📌 Why studying social context is hard

Selection bias makes it difficult to identify how social surroundings shape political attitudes. This study leverages a unique population whose placement is externally assigned to mitigate that problem and reveal causal influence of social context on views about immigration.

📊 Natural assignment among global missionaries

• Sample: 1,804 young people who served as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
• Design: Interviews conducted before and after extended mission service in a diverse set of locations around the world.
• Key feature: Missionaries had no control over their assignment location, creating variation in exposure to immigrant populations that is plausibly exogenous to prior attitudes.

🔎 What changed in immigration attitudes

Clear evidence shows assignment location affected policy views on undocumented immigrants:

• Overall, respondents became more tolerant toward undocumented immigrants when sent to places where contact with immigrants was more likely.
• Within the United States, the largest increases in pro-immigrant attitudes occurred among missionaries assigned to communities with larger Hispanic populations and among those assigned to speak a language other than English.

⚖️ Why this matters

These findings demonstrate that lived social context—and likely interpersonal contact—can shift immigration attitudes, while addressing selection concerns that often plague observational studies. Results have implications for theories of contact and opinion formation and for understanding how community composition and language exposure shape policy views.