According to motivated reasoning theory, people are inclined to reject information not aligned with their initial opinion. For example, in the context of immigration, liberals, who are usually more inclusive in their consideration of immigrants as fellow citizens, may dismiss negative news about immigration or even perceive them as biased and potentially polarize their initial attitude. The same is true for conservatives, who typically have more exclusive ideas of who belongs in their country and may dismiss positive news about immigration or even perceive them as biased, potentially polarizing their opinion. Hence, the present research aimed to investigate how people perceive and react to news about immigration, how their political leanings influence the effect of such news on citizenship representations, and how positive imagined encounters with immigrants may contribute to attenuate conservatives’ defensive processing of positive news about immigration.