Managing the National Status Group: Immigration Policy in Germany

This article challenges the established convention in immigration policy scholarship of treating economic utility and identity maintenance as logically distinct concerns. Drawing on work by Weber, Wallerstein and Bourdieu, we argue that concerns about economic utility and identity maintenance interact in the immigration policies of Western liberal democratic states, leading to policies designed to build and maintain middle‐class national status groups. Using the example of contemporary immigration policy in Germany, we illustrate how this impulse to build the middle‐class status group affects immigrant inclusion/exclusion in nuanced ways at both the group and individual levels, along class/status, ethnic and gender lines. We conclude by considering the policy implications of growing and shaping populations according to middle‐class ideals, particularly for the statistical monitoring of immigrant populations for integration benchmarking purposes.     

The Determinants of Immigration from Fiji to New Zealand: An Empirical Reassessment using the Bounds Testing Approach

This article re‐examines Gani's (1998) findings on the determinants of migrant flows from Fiji to New Zealand by employing the bounds testing procedure to cointegration, within an autoregressive distributive lag framework. The main findings are that in the long run all variables are statistically insignificant, although correctly signed with the exception of the unemployment differential. In the short run, in sharp contrast to Gani's (1998) findings, political instability is consistently the most important determinant of migration flows while the standard of living and real wage differentials are statistically insignificant across all specifications.     

Political Economy of Immigration in Germany: Attitudes and Citizenship Aspirations1

This paper examines resident foreigners’ interest in German citizenship. We use a unique data set from a survey of foreign residents in the German states to study the roles played by factors such as attitudes towards foreigners and political interest of foreigners. We find that negative attitudes towards foreigners and generational conflict within foreigner families are significant negative factors. While interest in political participation is among the important positive factors, hostile attitudes, lack of voting rights, or uncertainty about staying in Germany mainly discourage foreigners who actively participate in the labor market, have more years of schooling, and are younger.     

On the Impossibility of Getting It Right the First Time: Cultural Determinants of Theory

Although our very name, social work announces that this profession is attentive to the socio-cultural surround and the ways in which environment plays its role in the shaping of our psyches, the clinicians among us have drawn extensively on psychoanalytic theory, although they were aware that until very recently its theories remained rather culture-blind. Perhaps in some measure due to the increasing proportion of social workers trained as analysts, there now exists in the analytic world an intention to integrate into its practices and theories that fourth leg, the culture (or cultures) in which we are born and live. It may be that the largely female social work profession may play an important role in enabling psychoanalysis to overcome its previous unconsciousness about that component.     

Attitudes toward Immigrants,Immigration, and Multiculturalism in New Zealand: A Social Psychological Analysis1

The research examines attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy based on a random sample of 2,020 New Zealand households. The analyses revealed that New Zealanders have positive attitudes toward immigrants and endorse multiculturalism to a greater extent than Australians and EU citizens. In addition, structural equation modeling produced an excellent fit of the data to a social psychological model commencing with multicultural ideology and intercultural contact as exogenous variables, leading, in turn, to diminished perceptions of threat, more positive attitudes toward immigrants, and, finally, support for New Zealand's policies on the number and sources of migrants.     

Identity Crisis and Integration: The Divergent Attitudes of Iranian Immigrant Men and Women towards Integration into Swedish Society

The main objective of this article is to show the divergent attitudes of Iranian immigrant men and women towards integration into Swedish society.
As several studies have shown, Iranian women have a better chance of adjusting to Western societies than Iranian men. This article discusses the notion that one of the important reasons for this is the determining role of professional position in the life of Iranian immigrants in Sweden.
As a result of the improvement in their work status and therefore an improvement in their social position, Iranian immigrant women now have greater possibilities than Iranian immigrant men to overcome the identity crisis which ordinarily makes ethnic groups and cultural minorities lose their sense of fitting into their new social reality.
This results, in its turn, in the women having a positive attitude towards the new society and increases the extent of their desire for integration into the new society.     

Attitudes towards European Monetary Union in Greece: Antecedents, strength and consequences

The objective of the present study was twofold: First, to examine Greek people's attitudes towards European Monetary Union (EMU) and to explore the antecedents, strength and consequences of these attitudes on intentions to support or oppose the single European currency. Second, and from a more theoretical perspective, to investigate the structure of attitude strength and the effects of strength dimensions on attitude–intention consistency. A total of 644 Greek citizens participated in the study. The findings indicate that Greeks are fairly supportive of the monetary union and are quite optimistic about its consequences. The anticipated outcomes of EMU for Greece and for Europe were found to be significant determinants of attitudes. In addition, attitudes were determined by the strength of national identity and by the more general attitudes towards the membership of Greece in the European Union. On the whole, attitudes were fairly strong and had a substantial relation with intentions. Attitude strength was found to consist of three dimensions: Embeddedness, Conviction and Internal Consistency. Only Conviction and Internal Consistency were found to have a significant moderating effect on the attitude–intention relation. Further, the moderating effect of these factors was interactive, in that either high Conviction or high Internal Consistency sufficed to make an attitude influential.     

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.     

Attitudes towards globalization and cosmopolitanism: cultural diversity, personal consumption and the national economy

One of the widely accepted consequences of globalization is the development of individual outlooks, behaviours and feelings that transcend local and national boundaries. This has encouraged a re-assessment of important assumptions about the nature of community, personal attachment and belonging in the face of unprecedented opportunities for culture, identities and politics to shape, and be shaped by, global events and processes. Recently, the upsurge of interest in the concept of cosmopolitanism has provided a promising new framework for understanding the nexus between cosmopolitan dispositions and global interconnectedness across cultural, political and economic realms. Using data from a representative social survey of Australians this paper investigates the negotiation of belonging under the conditions of globalization. The data tap into attitudes and behaviours associated with a broad gamut of cosmopolitan traits in the domains of culture, consumption, human rights, citizenship, and international governance. They show how cosmopolitan outlooks are shaped by social structural factors, and how forms of identification with humanity and the globe are fractured by boundaries of self and others, threats and opportunities, and the value of things global and local.     

“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.     

当代家庭代际支持观念与群体差异——兼论反馈模式的文化基础变迁

通过对上海和兰州两地的抽样调查数据的分析发现,善事父母仍受高度重视,为孩子无限操心的认可度没有孝顺父母的认可度高。虽然经济和社会福利进步对传统代际伦理有所冲击,但青年人的代际支持观念总体上呈现"重老轻小",而非大众舆论中的"孝道衰落"态势。对子女的无限责任伦理消解与现实中子女对父母的工具性依赖增大形成张力,冲击了传统反馈模式实现代内均衡的基础。     

High Stakes: Time Poverty,Testing, and the Children of the Working Poor

Sociological interest in the implementation of policy generally focuses on the ways a single stream of policy creates a set of measurable consequences either for parents or children. This article takes an ethnographic approach to the study of conflicting policy mandates that collide in the lives of families moving from welfare to work at the same time that schools are implementing high stakes tests and the end of social promotion. We show that these two policies make contradictory demands on parents, to the potential detriment of children. Ethnographic research reveals the ways in which multiple and incompatible forms of policy impact poor families, putting them in the unhappy position of choosing between economic stability or mobility and children's educational performance.     

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.     

Undergraduate Activists in the Woman's Movement and Their Public: Attitudes towards Marriage and the Family

Abstract

This paper compares the attitudes towards women's home and famiy roles of two groups of undergraduate women: undergraduate activists in the Women's Liberation Movement and a random sample of non-activist undergraduates. Data from both of these groups pertaining to career aspirations, marital and fertility expectations, communal living arrangements, and possible strains between future family and work roles are examined. While the desire to combine family and career roles is typical of undergraduate women in both groups, there are important differences between activists and non-activists in their plans for integrating the two role constellations. Activist women's responses are also compared with positions on women's family roles indicated by spokeswomen of the wider radical Women's Movement, and some important differences are suggested by the data. The paper concludes by briefly exploring the implications of the findings for future social change in the family and in the society of which it is a part.     

Research on the Attitudes of Pupils and Teachers towards the Shoa in Germany

In this paper, I examine the state of Holocaust education in Germany. I also look carefully at the knowledge and attitudes of German students, from both the western and eastern part of the country. Through the presentation of results from various empirical studies, I compare German students with other students in Europe. I conclude that, though the overall picture is quite positive in German schools, there is some cause for concern due to the fact that certain taboos surrounding National Socialism seem to be disappearing among the younger generations.     

Economic Crisis and Marital Problems in Turkey: Testing the Family Stress Model

This paper applied the family stress model to the case of Turkey in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis. Using structural equation modeling and a nationally representative urban sample of 711 married women and 490 married men, we tested whether economic hardship and the associated family economic strain on families resulted in greater marital problems. Our results showed a modified family stress model applies to Turkey. In contrast to most previous research, economic strain had a direct effect on marital problems, and the indirect effect of strain, via emotional distress, was only significant for women. The results were interpreted in light of social and cultural factors that condition how economic distress affects marital relations.     

Segmented Assimilation,Local Context and Determinants of Drug Violence in Miami and San Diego: Does Ethnicity and Immigration Matter?1

Does the ethnic and immigrant composition of a community and existence of immigrant enclaves or barrios influence community level drug violence? This study explores the relationship between these and other factors in Miami and San Diego census tracts. We employ data about the distribution of Cubans, Central Americans, Haitians, Mexicans and Southeast Asians, controlling for social and economic influences of drug versus non‐drug violence. We also analyze the impact of various waves of immigration and immigrant communities to understand the circumstances under which drug violence occurs or is limited at the census tract level. The findings lend some support to the positive and negative aspects of Portes and Rumbaut's (2001) segmented assimilation hypothesis in Miami and San Diego neighborhoods. The strength of this conclusion varies and is contingent upon ethnic composition, new versus old immigration, and the all‐encompassing effects of economic deprivation     

Money,Marriage, and Children: Testing the Financial Expectations and Family Formation Theory

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey (N = 2,954), a birth cohort study, this work examines how gains in earnings and income are associated with marriage and subsequent childbearing for low‐income couples. Using change models, results indicate that positive changes in earnings, controlling for baseline levels of earnings, were associated with greater odds of marriage. Cohabiting couples who became poor were associated with a 37% decrease in marriage likelihood. Neither earnings nor income was affiliated with additional fertility. Results are consistent with the Financial Expectations and Family Formation theory, which posits that positive economic circumstances are necessary for marriage, but are not associated with subsequent childbearing.