The limits of ethnic capital: impacts of social desirability on Korean views of co-ethnic immigration.

A substantial body of research has found that social desirability motivates respondents to overstate support for immigration when asked directly, but when provided an unobtrusive means of expressing preferences, support declines. In this paper, we ask whether South Koreans follow this pattern, especially with regards to co-ethnic migrants from North Korea and China. We use list experiments to determine whether observed levels of support for general immigration and co-ethnic migration are biased by social desirability. We find that generally respondents overstate their support for co-ethnics from North Korea by a significant amount when asked directly, but not for the other groups, although college-educated respondents overstate their support for general immigration. Social desirability bias with respect to co-ethnics from North Korea is particularly evident in older respondents and males. These findings challenge the notion that native-born citizens prefer co-ethnic immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]