Explaining Attitudes toward Immigrants and Immigration Policy: A Review of the Theoretical Literature

In the research literature on immigration attitudes, there are a number of theories that explain why individuals hold positive or negative opinions of certain immigrant groups and immigration policies. In this review of the literature, the theories are summarized into five categories: personal and social identity, self and group interest, cultural values and beliefs, social interaction, and multilevel theories. The majority of the theories offer explanations that favor one causal direction, focus on social psychology or the social structural environment, and assume that effects are additive rather than interactive. It is argued in this review that scholars would benefit by using multilevel theories, such as group position theory and intersectionality, in order to extend their explanatory reach past the theoretical standards and, in doing so, be able to better examine some understudied but important questions, such as why individuals often hold pro‐ and anti‐immigrant opinions simultaneously. Multilevel theories have the potential to offer a nuanced understanding of immigration attitudes.     

Immigration Attitudes Before and After Tragedy in Copenhagen: The Importance of Political Affiliation and Safety Concerns

This research analyzes attitudes on immigration before and after the February 14–15, 2015 Copenhagen shootings. Little research has been conducted on changes in immigration beliefs pre‐ and postcrisis events, and, further, this research has not closely considered how political views and safety concerns may operate within immigration beliefs in an additive, interactive, or mediating fashion. Using the 2014 and 2015 Copenhagen Area Surveys, the latter conducted shortly after the February shootings, our findings show that taking the survey either before or after the shootings did not shape immigration policy preferences. Instead, the findings reveal that right‐leaning political affiliation and a greater fear of crime are the strongest predictors of anti‐immigration attitudes. Implications center on new approaches to understanding societal responses to crisis events.     

The Flag or the Pocketbook: To What are Immigrants a Threat

An increasing number of immigrants and rising unemployment rates are widely thought to contribute to the electoral success of extreme right parties in Western Europe. However, no study explicitly posits the causal mechanism that links the aggregate level factors of immigration and unemployment to the electoral success of extreme right parties, and systematically analyzes whether and how this mechanism works. Thus, the causal connection between immigration, unemployment and extreme right success remains at best ambiguous. I argue that the causal mechanism linking immigration and unemployment to extreme right electoral performance is the development of anti‐immigrant attitudes at the individual level. In this paper, I examine how unemployment and immigration affect individuals’ attitudes toward immigrants. This examination furthers our understanding of the actual dynamics of how unemployment and immigration influences the electoral success of extreme right parties. I find that greater unemployment rates increase the probability that an individual will have an anti‐immigrant attitude only when immigration is already at a high level. Similarly, increasing immigration alone does not always increase the probability that an individual will have an anti‐immigrant attitude.     

Experiencing ‘Illegality’ as a Family? Immigration Enforcement,Social Policies,and Discourses Targeting Mexican Mixed‐Status Families

Mexican mixed‐status families have been front and center in embroiled national debates about the place of undocumented immigrants and their citizen family members in this country. These families face unique obstacles, including possible family fragmentation caused by deportation, challenges to birthright citizenship, and they are often targeted by anti‐immigrant elected officials and political pundits that perpetuate a racialized discourse that casts even citizen children in these families as an abomination of US citizenship. Therefore, “illegality” may be a familial experience that can be endured by citizens and non‐citizens alike. Despite their unique vulnerabilities, researchers know very little about how mixed‐status families experience belonging in the country while managing possible tensions and inequalities shaped by immigration status. In this article, I review the research on punitive immigration enforcement and the scholarship on social policies and discourse targeting mixed‐status families. I conclude by reviewing new directions in sociological research and suggest avenues for research that may examine mixed‐status families' subjectivities, belonging, and negotiations of family relationships.     

The Influence of Attitudes toward Immigrants on International Migration

We investigate whether anti‐immigrant attitudes affect migrant inflows in Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries. Using longitudinal exhaustive data, we find that natives’ hostility, particularly natives’ propensity to discriminate on the labor market, reduces immigration. This effect is comparable to more conventional migration factors. We obtain robust results when we, for example, capture hostility with far‐right parties’ popularity instead and control for tighter immigration policies or multilateral resistance to migration. We find a stronger effect for EU‐to‐EU migrants, migrants from developed countries and linguistically close countries. Our results raise a challenge for policy makers when the demand for foreign workers and anti‐immigrant sentiment are present.     

“No Thanks,We’re Full”: Individual Characteristics,National Context,and Changing Attitudes Toward Immigration1

In this paper we examine how individual‐level characteristics and national context affect attitudes toward immigration. Although many previous studies have compared attitudes toward immigration across countries, little attention has been paid to how attitudes may be affected by changes within a country over time. We take advantage of seventeen national Canadian Gallup surveys to consider how differences in national economic conditions and changing immigration flows affect attitudes and changes in attitudes between 1975 and 2000. While the state of the national economy affects attitudes this is not the case for the rate of immigration. Rather than affecting some groups more than others the state of the economy has a relatively uniform effect across groups. Our results also show that far from being a continuum, being anti‐immigration and being pro‐immigration are qualitatively different. Interest, ideology, and the national economy affect anti‐immigration sentiments, but only ideology affects pro‐immigration sentiments.     

Determinants of Attitudes towards Immigration: Testing the Influence of Interculturalism,Group Threat Theory and National Contexts in Time of Crisis

Since 2008 a profound crisis, not only economic but also political, has been affecting the EU. The Eurobarometers carried out by the European Commision show an increased percentage of people who see their country as not having benefitted from being an EU member. In addition, the presence of extreme‐right parties has grown recently in several democracies. These parties adopt not only an anti‐European but also an anti‐immigrant stance. It is precisely the growing strength and visibility of this link between anti‐Europeanism and anti‐immigration in ideological positions that has prompted our research. Using data from the Eurobarometer 71.3 (2009) for eleven countries, we confirm a correlation between intercultural dialogue – measured using a proxy variable: European identification – and tolerance. Results also corroborate group threat theory. However, the best model takes into account national contexts. These findings show the relevance of studying national historical and cultural traditions to understand how prejudices develop.     

Immigrants,Natives and Social Assistance: Comparable Take‐Up Under Comparable Circumstances

Are immigrants on welfare because they are more likely to be eligible or because they are more likely to claim benefits for which they are eligible? The answer is politically important, but because most current research on immigration and welfare is based on data from the United States, the answer is difficult due to the complexities of the transfer system which make eligibility determinations difficult. In Germany, by contrast, eligibility for the main cash transfer program, Sozialhilfe (Social Assistance), is determined by a comparatively simple nationwide formula. We use data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel to test whether immigrants to Germany are more likely than natives to claim welfare benefits for which they are eligible. We find that immigrants are more likely than native Germans to receive welfare, both because immigrants are more likely to be eligible and because they are more likely, when eligible, to claim their benefits. However, we also find that this greater propensity to take‐up benefits is not related to immigrant status per se: when other sociodemographic factors are accounted for in an appropriate manner, immigrant households are no more likely to take‐up benefits than native households.     

Explaining Pro‐Immigrant Sentiment in the U.S.: Social Class,Cosmopolitanism, and Perceptions of Immigrants1

In the U.S., research on attitudes toward immigrants generally focuses on anti‐immigrant sentiment. Yet, the 1996 General Social Survey indicates that half the population believes that immigrants favorably impact the U.S. economy and culture. Using these data, we analyze theories of both pro‐ and anti‐immigrant sentiment. While we find some support for two theories of intergroup competition, our most important finding connects a cosmopolitan worldview with favorable perceptions of immigrants. We find that cosmopolitans – people who are highly educated, in white‐collar occupations, who have lived abroad, and who reject ethnocentrism – are significantly more pro‐immigrant than people without these characteristics.     

Welfare Reform and Immigrant Participation in Welfare Programs

This article examines the impact of the 1996 welfare reform legislation on welfare use in immigrant households. Although the data indicate that the welfare participation rate of immigrants declined relative to that of natives at the national level, this national trend is entirely attributable to the trends in welfare participation in California. Immigrants living in California experienced a precipitous drop in their welfare participation rate (relative to natives). Immigrants living outside California experienced roughly the same decline in participation rates as natives. The potential impact of welfare reform on immigrants residing outside California was neutralized because many state governments responded to the federal legislation by offering state‐funded programs to their immigrant populations and because the immigrants themselves responded by becoming naturalized citizens. The very steep decline of immigrant welfare participation in California is harder to understand, but could be a by‐product of the changed political and social environment following the enactment of Proposition 187.

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Exploring the Contextual Determinants of Individual Attitudes toward Immigrants and Criminal Activity and their Spillover Policy Implications

Immigrants are routinely tied to a range of social problems in the policy making process in the US political system. Little is known however about the extent to which citizens hold attitudes that connect immigrants to particular social problems and whether these attitudes spill over to influence citizens’ preferences toward specific public policy alternatives that might appear to be largely independent of immigrants and immigration. Investigating the nexus between immigration and crime, we ask how Anglo whites’ contextual environments influence their propensity to link immigrants to a salient social pathology like crime. Results show that whites living in states where immigrant populations have increased most dramatically and in states with lower socioeconomic characteristics are more likely to associate immigration with increased criminal activity. Whites’ attitudes toward immigration‐induced crime has important spillover implications to the larger public policy making process as whites who view immigrants as a cause of criminal activity are more likely to support tougher criminal sentencing and the death penalty.     

Hiding in plain sight: Dehumanization as a foundation of white racial prejudice

In the media, during sporting events, in online forums, and in interpersonal interactions, whites often portray Black people as animals, especially as apes or monkeys. In this essay we consider what contemporary research on prejudice in American politics has to say about these dehumanizing portrayals of Black people. We argue that contemporary political science work has not done enough to understand both the historical roots and the continuing practices of whites' dehumanization of Black people, to the detriment of an accurate understanding of racial attitudes in the United States. To rectify this omission, we draw on the work of historians to map out a brief overview of race-making and the dehumanizing attitudes that shaped this process. Then, we review political science literature on contemporary white attitudes toward Black people, emphasizing connections between prevailing conceptions of these attitudes and long-standing processes of dehumanization. We conclude by charting directions for future scholarship; we seek to unsettle the mainstream of a subfield dominated by mild conceptions of racial attitudes.     

Serving immigrant families and children in New York City's child welfare system

This article describes the efforts and special initiatives of New York City's Administration for Children's Services to improve services to immigrant and English language learner populations. Children's Services convened an immigration issues advisory subcommittee, created special tools for child welfare staff, collaborated with legal agencies to assist foster children with immigration status adjustments, improved agency data collection, and launched an agency-wide training initiative on immigration issues. The challenges encountered by Children's Services offer important insight for child welfare agencies in other jurisdictions designing strategies to strengthen their services for immigrant communities.     

Immigration and Immigrants

Abstract

Public opinion polls conducted from 1964 to 1999 found that Americans' desire to reduce immigration increased dramatically, but there existed a wide variation regarding which nationalities were to be restricted. Furthermore, the majority believed that many immigrants wind up on welfare and raise taxes for Americans and, hence, cause problems for the United States. This article reports on these findings and their implications for current political attitudes toward immigration and recent change and proposed changes inimmigration laws and programs.     

Does media coverage influence public attitudes towards welfare recipients? The impact of the 2011 English riots

Following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police on 4 August 2011, there were riots in many large cities in the UK. As the rioting was widely perceived to be perpetrated by the urban poor, links were quickly made with Britain's welfare policies. In this paper, we examine whether the riots, and the subsequent media coverage, influenced attitudes toward welfare recipients. Using the British Social Attitudes survey, we use multivariate difference‐in‐differences regression models to compare attitudes toward welfare recipients among those interviewed before (pre‐intervention: i.e. prior to 6 August) and after (post‐intervention: 10 August–10 September) the riots occurred (N = 3,311). We use variation in exposure to the media coverage to test theories of media persuasion in the context of attitudes toward welfare recipients. Before the riots, there were no significant differences between newspaper readers and non‐readers in their attitudes towards welfare recipients. However, after the riots, attitudes diverged. Newspaper readers became more likely than non‐readers to believe that those on welfare did not really deserve help, that the unemployed could find a job if they wanted to and that those on the dole were being dishonest in claiming benefits. Although the divergence was clearest between right‐leaning newspaper and non‐newspaper readers, we do not a find statistically significant difference between right‐ and left‐leaning newspapers. These results suggest that media coverage of the riots influenced attitudes towards welfare recipients; specifically, newspaper coverage of the riots increased the likelihood that readers of the print media expressed negative attitudes towards welfare recipients when compared with the rest of the population.     

Can We Measure Immigrants' Legal Status? Lessons from Two U.S. Surveys

This research note examines response and allocation rates for legal status questions asked in publicly available U.S. surveys to address worries that the legal status of immigrants cannot be reliably measured. Contrary to such notions, we find that immigrants' non‐response rates to questions about legal status are typically not higher than non‐response rates to other immigration‐related questions, such as country of birth and year of immigration. Further exploration of two particular surveys – the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LAFANS) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) – reveals that these data sources produce profiles of the unauthorized immigrant population that compare favorably to independently estimated profiles. We also find in the case of the SIPP that the introduction of legal status questions does not appear to have an appreciable “chilling effect” on the subsequent survey participation of unauthorized immigrant respondents. Based on the results, we conclude that future data collection efforts should include questions about legal status to (1) improve models of immigrant incorporation; and (2) better position assimilation research to inform policy discussions.     

How Watershed Immigration Policies Affect American Public Opinion Over a Lifetime

Important political events are known to influence political socialization and development (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002 ). It is also possible that such events impact political socialization within particular age cohorts, and also across important social groups who may be impacted differently by landmark events. This paper examines whether landmark immigration events can leave a permanent mark on an individual's views toward immigrants and immigration, and whether that impact varies across different ethnic/racial groups in the United States Specifically, we examine the cohort of individuals who were in their formative years during the passage of major US immigration bills that were proposed or enacted from 1965 to 2010. Altogether, we focus on four pieces of landmark immigration legislation. The findings reveal variations on the effect of these events depending on the group in question; a relationship also emerges between these landmark legislative events and attitudes on immigration policies. The analysis contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the ways in which political elites influence attitudes, and we discuss how the findings may apply to other contexts outside the US.     

Gendered Perspectives in Psychology: Immigrant Origin Youth

In this article, we contend that the field of psychology has largely failed to foreground the role of gender in its study of immigration. Here, we review studies that address gender and migration focusing on the experience of children and adolescents. We provide developmental perspectives on family relations, well‐being, identity formation, and educational outcomes, paying particular attention to the role of gender in these domains. We conclude with recommendations for future research, which include the need to consider whether, and if so, how, when, and why it makes a difference to be an immigrant, to be from a particular country, or to be female rather than male. We argue that it is important to consider socioeconomic characteristics; to consider resilience as well as pathology; and to work in interdisciplinary ways to deepen our understanding of the gendered migratory experience of immigrant origin youth.     

Has Opposition to Immigration Increased in the United States after the Economic Crisis? An Experimental Approach

We employ two population‐level experiments to accurately measure opposition to immigration before and after the economic crisis of 2008. Our design explicitly addresses social desirability bias, which is the tendency to give responses that are seen favorably by others and can lead to substantial underreporting of opposition to immigration. We find that overt opposition to immigration, expressed as support for a closed border, increases slightly after the crisis. However, once we account for social desirability bias, no significant increase remains. We conclude that the observed increase in anti‐immigration sentiment in the post‐crisis United States is attributable to greater expression of opposition rather than any underlying change in attitudes.     

Explaining Attitudes towards Self-employment among Immigrants: A Canadian Case Study

Implicit in Canada's immigration policies is that some immigrants are endowed with a particular entrepreneurial spirit, and that this spirit relates to immigrants’ origin. This paper examines whether attitudes towards entrepreneurship indeed relate to origin, or whether they can be explained through labour market circumstances at the place of settlement and/or Canada's immigrant selection procedure. The empirical study focuses on the reported attitudes towards entrepreneurship. A survey of 509 Vancouver residents of a predominantly Chinese immigrant neighbourhood, a predominantly South Asian immigrant neighbourhood, and a neighbourhood of non‐immigrants reveals that ethnic origin is a weak indicator of entrepreneurial attitudes. Instead, urban or rural background emerges as a more powerful predictor. The results also raise doubts about whether the Canadian government's immigration policy, which selects immigrants on the basis of economic potential, indeed selects immigrants with a greater desire to become self‐employed. Furthermore, the amount of time immigrants have spent in Canada does not significantly affect attitudes towards entrepreneurship.