A tale of two logics: how solidarity and threat perceptions shape immigrant attitudes towards immigration in Western Europe

Abstract

Scholars have paid considerable attention to the attitudes of host societies towards immigration. However, relatively little is known about whether and under which conditions immigrants themselves support immigration more or less than those without a migration background. This study argues that immigrant attitudes towards immigration are motivated by two competing logics, solidarity and threat, with each logic being activated under different circumstances. Specifically, the relative strength of the two logics depends on factors relating to (1) the immigrants themselves (e.g. how long they have been living in their host country), (2) the type of immigration in question (i.e. characteristics of the prospective immigrants) and (3) certain conditions in the host country (particularly the presence or absence of discrimination and assimilation pressure). Evidence from the European Social Survey in 15 West European countries over a period of 18 years (2002–2019) supports these theoretical expectations.

Keywords:

• Migration
• public opinion
• immigration attitudes
• minority solidarity thesis
• intergroup threat theory

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to participants at the 2022 European Consortium for Political Research General Conference in Innsbruck and LMU Munich’s Comparative Politics Research Seminar, especially Nicole Bolleyer, Philipp Schroeder and Daniela Braun. We would also like to thank the editors and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A country that exemplifies such complex demographics is Germany, where roughly one in four people have a migration background (Staudenmaier 2018).

2 In this study, we use the term “immigrant” in a broad sense, including both first-generation migrants (i.e. those who were born outside of their current country of residence) and second-generation migrants (i.e. those who were born inside their current country of residence but at least one of their parents was born outside of it).

3 The EU-15 include: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

4 Note that with this data basis we cannot conclusively determine whether the same person has experienced both personal discrimination and assimilation pressure. In addition, the ESS data does not allow us to identify which conditions or groups of factors are most relevant in shaping immigrant attitudes due to different scales and samples.

5 Among respondents with a migration background, the mean value of our discrimination index is about four times higher (x– =0.04) than it is for the full sample.

6 To test differences in effect size, we use the esizei command in STATA.

7 Unfortunately, the ESS dataset does not include a measure of solidarity with prospective migrants that we could use in a similar analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Neureiter

Michael Neureiter is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Political Science at LMU Munich. His research interests include political behaviour, migrant integration, and public opinion. His articles have appeared in journals such as Political Psychology, International Migration Review, and Political Science Research and Methods. [[email protected]]

Felix Schulte

Felix Schulte is a Senior Researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). His research interests include empirical conflict research, especially ethnic conflicts, conflict dynamics, interethnic relations and post-conflict institutional engineering. [[email protected]]