Restrictive borders and rights: attitudes of the Danish public to asylum seekers

ABSTRACT

Social mechanisms explaining Danes’ attitudes to asylum seekers were analysed on two main dimensions: border control and rights allocation, in a national survey of 500 adult respondents in September 2013. Data show that the respondents supported exclusionary practices against asylum seekers much more than exclusion from rights. Three main mechanisms were simultaneously at play in both exclusionary dimensions: perceptions of threat, social distance (prejudice), and perceiving asylum seekers as not “genuine refugees”. Identifying asylum seekers’ as a security and socio-economic threat, as persons not in “real” fear of persecution, together with prejudicial attitudes to them had a boosting effect on excluding asylum seekers from the Danish collective in terms of entry and rights. Findings are discussed in light of existing theories on exclusionary attitudes to asylum seekers.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes
• asylum seekers
• perceptions of threat
• prejudice
• bogus refugees
• Denmark

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Danmarks Statistik, own data analysis.

2 The web panel comprised participants in previous nationally representative telephone surveys conducted by Voxmeter. Respondents in our survey were randomly selected by region to ensure national representativeness.

3 To test whether feelings of social distance, perceptions of security and socio-economic threat and entitlement to rights are four separate and distinct concepts, a confirmatory factor analysis with four latent variables was conducted with AMOS. The empirical analysis revealed that the data provided a good fit to the measurement model (Chi²/DF=1.737, CFI=0.994, RMSEA=0.038) which is considered a highly acceptable standard (Arbuckle 2008). Full results of the SEM model, including factor loadings are presented in the supplementary files Appendix 2.

4 Yet the effect of social distance on border policy preferences was significant at p=0.09, so it may be considered borderline.

5 We also included in the initial model an interaction term between social distance and legitimacy of claims (being “non-genuine” refugees) but it was not found significant.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection in this study was supported by a research grant awarded to the first author by the Danish Israeli Study Foundation in memory of Josef and Regine Nachemsohn.