Different groups,different threats: public attitudes towards immigrants‡

Research on attitudes towards immigrants devotes much attention to the relative effects of economic and social-psychological factors for understanding sentiment towards immigrants, conceived in general terms. In this article, we advance this work by arguing that the context framing immigration concerns leads publics to associate different types of immigrants with different threats. An issue context that diminishes support for one ‘type’ can boost it for another. Evidence from an original survey experiment in Britain supports this claim. Security fears affect attitudes towards Muslim immigrants but economic concerns bear on views towards Eastern Europeans. While concern about crime adversely affects sentiment for East Europeans but casts Muslims more positively, cultural threats have the opposite effect. By shifting the focus onto the qualities of different types of immigrants, we highlight the importance of the target immigrant group for understanding public attitudes.     

‘I’m a different kind of biracial’: how black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race

Increasingly, multiracial families have garnered scholarly attention. However, the roles of ethnicity and immigrant ties are largely absent in bi/multiracial studies. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with black/white biracial Americans with at least one immigrant parent, this study analyzes the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, and immigrant roots in the bi/multiracial community. Our findings show that participants struggle to articulate the meaning of race, and they assert specific racial/ethnic identities to circumvent stereotypical connotations of whiteness and blackness. We highlight how biracial Americans with immigrant ties – those who we might assume would have a limited understanding of race – voice clear understandings of racial superiority and inferiority, racial relations, and racial stereotypes. Emphasizing their ethnic roots is not only an attempt to accurately describe their ancestry; it also allows them to avoid the social consequences (i.e. stereotypes, discrimination, etc.) of being (half) white or (half) black.