Urban Europeans' viewpoints on immigrants in the city: Re-considering how group threat operates across national and urban contexts

Research analyzing attitudes toward immigrants in Europe studies how the immigrant population size in a country conditions prejudicial attitudes against immigrants. While research on immigrant group size in countries is important, research considering the size of immigrant groups at other geographic scales, such as cities, is relatively unexplored. Using data on nearly 30,000 residents of 63 European cities from the Flash Eurobarometer 366 survey, we ask: how does the immigrant population size in a country and a city relate to how Europeans consider immigrants in their city? Findings show support for a group threat framework in that greater immigrant group size is linked to more anti-immigrant views, but this finding holds only for cities, not for countries. Our discussion centers on the ways in which cities may be linked to this threat, and how a multi-scalar conception of group threat can uncover varying relationships for immigration attitudes.