After two decades of European politics during which border controls seemed like a relict from the past, the refugee crisis and the Brexit negotiations have brought the issue to the centre of the debate about European integration. So far there is a shortage of recent EU-wide analyses about the structure and drivers of public opinion towards the freedom of movement and border controls since 2015. Existing research on the British case has shown that Brexiteers regard disintegration from the EU as a means to restricting immigration and “taking back control” over their own borders. Yet it remains unclear in how far citizens in other member states share these concerns and whether the drivers for their support or opposition to open borders vary across national and regional contexts. This paper proposes answers to these questions based on a representative EU-wide survey experiment from mid-December 2017 (n=10.827), in which Europeans were asked to indicate their attitudes towards border controls and the freedom of movement within the EU. Moving beyond the extensive observational evidence on the relevance of material and cultural-identitarian factors, the paper discusses results from an experiment which systematically modifies the framing of border controls and the freedom of movement. The paper thereby speaks both to the intense public debate about one of the central achievements of integration and to the evolving academic literature on survey experiments in a European context.
