Immigration and Public Opinion in Liberal Democracies

Gary P. Freeman, Randall Hansen, David L. Leal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136211614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Although ambivalence characterizes the stance of scholars toward the desirability of close opinion-policy linkages in general, it is especially evident with regard to immigration. The controversy and disagreement about whether public opinion should drive immigration policy are among the factors making immigration one of the most difficult political debates across the West. Leading international experts and aspiring researchers from the fields of political science and sociology use a range of case studies from North America, Europe and Australia to guide the reader through the complexities of this debate offering an unprecedented comparative examination of public opinion and immigration.

• part one discusses the socio-economic and contextual determinants of immigration attitudes across multiple nations
• part two explores how the economy can affect public opinion
• part three presents different perspectives on the issue of causality – do attitudes about immigration drive politics, or do politics drive attitudes?
• part four investigates how several types of framing are critical to understanding public opinion and how a wide range of political factors can mould public opinion, and often in ways that work against immigration and immigrants
• part five examines the views of the largest immigrant group in the U.S. – Latinos – as well as how opinions are shaped by contact with and opinions about immigrants in the U.S. and Canada.

An essential read to all who wish to understand the nature of immigration research from a theoretical as well as practical point of view.

Part I

Demography and Public Opinion

1 Resistance to Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in the European Union

Cross-National Comparisons of Public Opinion

Marcel Coenders, Marcel Lubbers, and Peer Scheepers

INTRODUCTION AND QUESTIONS

The influx and presence of migrants have become major political issues causing much controversy. European countries had not actually developed immigration policies when they were faced with growing numbers of immigrants who knocked on the doors to work or to reunify families. Significant growth in immigration beginning in the 1970s sparked public debates on immigration policies that continue in the present (Pettigrew 1998), indicating resistance to immigrants. When in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s growing numbers of asylum seekers from all around the world also found their way to European states, a related debate came to the fore implying resistance to asylum seekers. Semyonov, Raijman, and Gorodzeisky (2006) showed that the rise of antiforeigner sentiment had been rather steep, particularly in the period between 1988 and 1994, and leveled off after that period.

European policymakers have come to realize that immigrants and asylum seekers are not temporary problems but rather persistent issues they have to face and deal with. However, European politicians have failed to reach consensus on effective policies across the European Union, agreeing on joint EU migration policies beginning only in 2010. Immigrants and asylum seekers also feature high on the public agenda of their host societies. The influx and presence of ethnic migrants and asylum seekers have become major public issues, causing much controversial resistance to these immigrants and asylum seekers, while also increasing the likelihood of voting for extreme right-wing parties across Europe (Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers 2002). This, in turn, affected the level of antiforeigner sentiment (Semyonov, Raijman, and Gorodzeisky 2006).

These so-called ethnic racial attitudes have been largely absent in studies of the U.S., at least in the grand overviews compiled by Schuman et al. (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Schuman et al. 1997). Exceptions in this regard are the studies by Espenshade and Hempstead (1996); Hood and Morris (1997). More recently, Fetzer (2000) has compared two European countries with the U.S. In Europe, on the other hand, large-scale cross-cultural comparisons regarding resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers have become possible since 2004, when data collected within the framework of the European Social Survey became available and utilized for these purposes (Coenders, Lubbers, and Scheepers 2005; Schneider 2008). This new possibility in turn allows us to discover the relationships between national demographic and economic conditions with public resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers.

The crucial question, then, is to what extent resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers actually prevails in the general public of societies of the European Union. More precisely, to what extent does the general public of different countries vary in resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers? A second, related question is more specific. Which particular social characteristics determine public resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers, and, moreover, are there specific determinants of resistance to immigrants versus resistance to asylum seekers? Third, we would like to take into account the very different national contexts of these countries, which differ not only with regard to the influx of migrants, but also in economic conditions, in order to address the question as to the extent to which particular national characteristics affect resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers.

GENERAL THEORIES ON RESISTANCE TO IMMIGRANTS AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

We regard resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers as dimensions of “ethnic exclusionism,” a more general term that encapsulates a multitude of racial attitudes on phenomena ranging from various types of prejudice (Pettigrew and Meertens 1995; Jones 1997; Coenders et al. 2001; Verberk, Scheepers, and Felling 2002); avoiding social contacts with ethnic out-groups (Hagendoorn 1995; Schlueter and Wagner 2008); rejection of principles and implementation of equal treatment (e.g., Schuman et al. 1997); to actual support for discrimination of out-groups (Coenders and Scheepers 1998; Coenders et al. 2008). Therefore, we use theoretical knowledge previously accumulated in studies on ethnic exclusionism to derive hypotheses for explaining cross-national and interindividual differences in resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers in order to answer the preceding questions.

In previous publications, two complementary paradigms, Realistic Conflict Theory and Social Identity Theory, were explored. Central to Realistic Conflict Theory is the proposition that competition over scarce resources between groups is considered the catalyst of antagonistic intergroup attitudes, and this has been underlined by two quite different traditions, both dating back to the 1950s. Social psychological experiments had shown that competition between groups improves solidar ity within a specific group and increases hostility between groups (Sherif and Sherif 1969, 1979). Sociologists have focused on societal causes of group conflicts as well as on societal conditions under which these conflicts arise. Coser (1956) claimed that each social system is characterized by competition over scarce resources (material resources, power, and status) between social groups, such as ethnic groups. Blumer (1958) added that the dominant group has a sense of claims on these scarce resources over subordinate groups. In this theoretical tradition, Blalock (1967) made an analytical distinction between, on the one hand, actual competition and, on the other hand, perceived competition. Blalock used “actual competition” to refer to macro- or meso-level socioeconomic conditions, such as the availability of scarce resources. Moreover, he suggested that actual competition may also refer to a micro-level phenomenon, i.e., competition between individuals from different ethnic groups that hold similar social positions (e.g., work in similar niches of the labor market), as elaborated by Olzak (1992). Blalock proposed that these actual competitive conditions might affect the majorities’ perceptions of competition, i.e., subjectively perceived socioeconomic threat on the part of ethnic out-groups, which in turn may induce hostile, unfavorable stances toward these out-groups. This argument was explained in a similar fashion by Bobo (1988), building on Blumer (1958), who proposed a relationship between “external threat” and “perceived threat” to explain opposition to racial policies.

This line of theorizing started from the bedrock assumption, explicated by Bobo (1988, 1999), that dominant group members affectively distinguish themselves as group members from other subordinate out-groups. This distinction is linked with presumed traits of both the in-group and the out-groups. The latter proposition has been substantiated by a second paradigm—Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Tajfel 1981, 1982; Brown 1995), according to which individuals have the fundamental need to achieve a positive social identity, which induces them to perceive their in-group as superior to ethnic out-groups. Subsequently, they apply favorable characte ristics that they perceive among members of the in-group to themselves via mental processes labeled as social identification, and they value out-groups negatively via mechanisms of social contra-identification. It is obvious that these mechanisms may have their effects, even under conditions of actual absence of ethnic out-groups, and therefore may explain the prevalence of anti-Semitism without the presence of Jewish people in the social contexts of majority groups (Tajfel 1981).

We propose that these identification processes may intensify under the competitive conditions on which Realistic Conflict Theories focuses. Therefore, we consider Social Identity Theory to be complementary to propositions from Realistic Conflict Theory,¹ which we refer to as Ethnic Group Conflict Theory, summarized in a core proposition: intergroup competition, at an individual as well as at a contextual level, may reinforce the mechanisms of social identification and contra-identification, eventually resulting in ethnic exclusionism. At the contextual level, competition refers to macrosocial conditions. At the individual level, competition may be specified in terms of the social conditions of the individual members of ethnic groups. Individual-level competition may also be specified in terms of the perceived threat of competition, which, we propose, mediates the effects of social conditions on ethnic exclusionism. This specification implies a more fully elaborated theoretical model (Scheepers, Gijsberts, and Coenders 2002).

FROM GENERAL THEORIES TO TESTABLE HYPOTHESES

A. Social Position and Religion

We use Ethnic Group Conflict Theory to derive hypotheses with regard to the effects of individual characteristics on resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers. We propose that the level of ethnic competition can be expected to vary between social categories. In particular, those social categories that hold similar social positions as ethnic minorities (Blalock 1967; Olzak 1992; Simon and Alexander 1993; Fetzer 2000) or those social categories that live close to ethnic enclaves (Hood and Morris 1997) may experience higher levels of ethnic competition than average, and may therefore display more widespread resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers. In many European countries, the overwhelming majority of non-autochthonous residents, immigrants, and asylum seekers are located in the lower strata of society, also very often concentrated in urban areas (Kiehl and Werner 1998). This implies that lower-strata members of the European-majority population who hold social positions comparable to those of ethnic minorities—that is, those with a low level of education or a low income level,² those performing manual labor, those who are unemployed, or those who live in urban areas³—will have to compete more with immigrants in, for instance, the labor market. These actual competitive conditions might reinforce the process of social identification and contra-identification, which may induce more widespread resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers, particularly among the social categories mentioned in the preceding.

Hence, we expect that (hypothesis 1) resistance to immigrants and asylum seekers will be strongly prevalent among social categories of the dominant group in similar social positions as ethnic out-groups, more particularly among: (1a) people with a low level of education, (1b) manual workers, (1c) the unemployed, (1d) people with low income, and (1e) people living in urban areas. Since we suspect that the general public may consider actual differences between immigrants and asylum seekers regarding motives to come to their country, the latter category may be treated with somewhat more compassion. Hence, we suspect that differences in resistance to asylum seekers may be less pronounced than differences in resistance to immigrants.

From quite a different perspective, evidence has been provided that religious people were rather prejudiced compared to nonreligious people (Gorsuch and Aleshire 1974; Hood et al. 1996). Although taking these empirical findings into account could be instructive, we must restrict the study to available data that include the practice dimension of religion (Stark and Glock 1968), which includes, among other aspects, people’s current church attendance. Some researchers found strong indications that the nature of this relationship is curvilinear: nonattenders and frequent attenders are supposed to be less prejudiced than those who infrequently to moderately frequently attend church (Adorno et al. 1950/1982; Allport and Ross 1967; Smith and Woodberry 2000). However, other research that covered eleven European countries found a simple linear relationship: the more frequently people attend church, the more exclusionism they display (Scheepers, Gijsberts, and Hello 2002). Considering the teachings of religions around the world (e.g., to love thy neighbor), we propose that there may be differential effects of church attendance: frequently attending people may want to help and welcome people in need, like asylum seekers, while resisting immigrants ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Immigration and Public Opinion
• Part I: Demography and Public Opinion
• Part II: Economics
• Part III: Framing and Institutional Effects
• Part IV: Diversity and Opinion
• Editor Biographies
• Contributor Biographies
• Index