Keywords: migration, prejudice, conjoint experiments, racism, Middle East

When and why do citizens prefer culturally (dis)similar migrants? This paper tests established theories in the migration preferences literature and draws from social psychology to offer alternative explanations for nativism. To better understand the relationship between nativism and prejudice, I leverage the United Arab Emirates as a natural experiment where institutional conditions largely rule out dominant theories premised on sectoral competition, welfare drain, and "cultural threat." Using an original survey conjoint experiment with 1,200 adult Emirati citizens, I draw on novel theories of status dominance to examine how prejudice manifests in counterintuitive ways. I hypothesize that Emiratis with high social dominance orientation (SDO) will exhibit polarized views on migrants, favoring low-status groups accentuating a positive status differential while disfavoring high-status groups whose immigration attenuates the native-migrant status gap. By contrast, citizens with low SDO may have globally positive views toward migrant groups, irrespective of status competition. By exploring whether prejudice can actually increase conditional support for low-status immigration, this research expands our theoretical toolkit to consider alternative explanations for nativism premised on prejudice and status dominance rather than symbolic threat.