During France’s 2024 elections, immigration dominated every news cycle and street corner argument. Voters insisted their views were settled. But researchers testing a simple premise during those same campaigns found something unexpected: remind people that immigrants are genuinely trying to fit in, to work, to raise kids who succeed, and long-held beliefs start to crack.
Amine Sijilmassi of the Institut Jean Nicod and colleagues conducted three experiments during the European and French parliamentary elections, when anti-immigration rhetoric reached fever pitch. Their results, published December 23 in PNAS Nexus, show that accurate information about immigrants’ daily efforts can substantially reduce common misperceptions and modestly lower opposition to immigration itself.
The research centers on what social scientists call “deservingness,” the gut-level judgment about whether someone is gaming the system or genuinely trying to contribute. It’s the difference between seeing an immigrant as a welfare opportunist versus someone learning a difficult language after exhausting workdays.
Facts about language learning and job hunting changed minds
In the first experiment, 480 participants evaluated fictional immigrant profiles. Immigrants described as motivated workers, actively learning French, or whose children climbed the social ladder were rated far more favorably, even when those immigrants started with low income and minimal education. The profiles weren’t just data points. Participants read about specific people, their job application histories, their struggles with pronunciation, their children’s school progress.
Sijilmassi’s team then tracked more than 2,700 participants throughout actual election campaigns. Half received factual corrections addressing common beliefs: that immigrants come mainly for welfare, avoid learning French, don’t seriously look for work, raise children who fall behind native-born peers.
The probability of endorsing negative views fell by 20 to 38 percentage points, depending on which belief was tested. These weren’t temporary reactions. The effects held one week later, even as campaign rhetoric intensified. Opposition to immigration itself dropped 3 to 5 percent on standard attitude scales, a modest but consistent shift that appeared across the political spectrum. Left-leaning and far-right participants responded similarly.
“These findings suggest that communication strategies emphasizing immigrants’ efforts to cooperate with the host society represent a promising approach to reducing anti-immigration bias, particularly because the effects were consistent across political ideologies,” Amine Sijilmassi explains.
Beliefs moved more easily than votes
Actual voting behavior proved harder to shift. The intervention produced small, inconsistent effects on support for far-right parties, and those results were sensitive to analytical choices. Beliefs and attitudes are easier to move than votes, particularly during polarized elections when party loyalty and social identity run deep.
The findings challenge assumptions that immigration attitudes are fixed. Previous research showed that correcting numerical myths, like exaggerated population estimates, rarely changes how people feel. This work suggests that highlighting human effort and cooperation matters more than abstract statistics or economic calculations.
Public conversations about immigration might land differently when they focus on lived trajectories: the hours spent in language classes, the job applications filed, the children helped with homework. Small changes can add up when repeated at scale, particularly in media coverage and political messaging.
The takeaway isn’t that minds flip overnight. It’s that they’re less closed than they feel. How immigrants are framed, as people trying, adapting, building lives, can reshape how one of the most contested issues gets discussed and understood.