Inequality and attitudes toward immigration: the native-immigrant gap in Australia

ABSTRACT

How does local economic inequality affect the native-immigrant gap in immigration attitudes? Existing studies do not distinguish between native and immigrant citizens, which is problematic because immigrants represent an increasing share of the population and voting public. Immigrant citizens, as legal residents, receive the same legal and social protections as native citizens. However, as an out-group, they are less likely to be attached to the national and cultural identity of a host country. This paper uses the Australian Election Study to show that immigrant citizens prioritise cultural or psychological considerations in forming immigration attitudes. As local economic inequality rises, immigrant citizens’ support for immigration strengthens regardless of their country of origin, reason for migration and length of stay in Australia.

地方上的经济不平等如何影响移民态度中的本地-外来隔阂？现有的研究没有区分本地居民和外来移民是有问题的，因为外来移民在人口和选民中占的比例越来越大。外来移民作为合法居民接受和本地居民一样的法律和社会保护。但毕竟是外来群体，他们对东道国的国家及文化认同不会太强。根据澳大利亚选举研究的资料，移民在形成移民态度时会优先考虑文化及心理因素。由于地方经济不平等的加剧，他们会更加支持移民，而不考虑其来自哪儿、为什么来、来了多久。

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality
• the native-immigrant citizen gap
• immigration
• Australia

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to participants of the 2017 Australian Society for Quantitative Political Science conference and Ian McAllister for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to the anonymous reviewers from this journal for their valuable and constructive comments. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship in the case of the corresponding author. This work was supported by the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2018- LAB-1250002).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Woo Chang Kang is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Korea University. He received his PhD in 2015 from New York University. Prior to coming to Korea University, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University (2015–2016) and a lecturer at the Australian National University. His research interests are in political behaviour and quantitative political analysis, with particular attention to Korea and the United States. His work appears in Political Geography, Electoral Studies, Conflict Management of Peace Science and the Journal of East Asian Studies among others.

Emily Look is a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University.

Notes

1 For specific examples, see Bergh and Bjørklund (2011).

2 According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2018), 29 per cent of the estimated resident population, which is 7.3 million, was born overseas as of June 2018.

3 There are other explanations for attitudes towards immigration such as perceived criminal threat (see Ceobanu 2011; Van der Linden and Jacobs 2017). However, theories of realistic and symbolic threats remain the dominant theoretical tradition (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014) and due to space limitations we focus on these in relation to immigrant citizens and economic inequality - both of which have received comparatively little attention.

4 Out of 12,200 surveys, there were 3,955 completed returns (3,379 mail returns, and 576 online returns). The raw response rate was 32.4 per cent. Refer to http://www.australianelectionstudy.org/ for details of the survey implementation.

5 As a reviewer suggests, the use of a single item as a dependent variable may suffer from possible measurement errors. However, we find that this question tabs into Australian attitudes toward immigration best, which is also supported by two recent studies such as Coma and Smith (2018) and Gravelle (2019).

6 The AES provides three different types of geographic information - postal code, CED and state. In the 2013 survey, 3955 respondents from 1333 postal areas participated. The mean number of respondents at the postal code level is about 5 and the standard deviation is 3.5. Given the small number of respondents at the postal area level, we set the second level at the CED level. The number of CEDs is 150.

7 See Estimates of Personal Income for Small Areas 2012–13 at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (https://goo.gl/FAcM2T). Note that the Census provides the Gini coefficients at the local government level. We convert this variable to the postcode level and calculate the average Gini coefficients of the postal codes that belong to the same CED.

8 The Gini coefficient for gross household income is 0.434 in 2015–16 at the national level. The Gini coefficient for equivalised disposable household income, after taking into account household composition and income tax, is 0.323 for the same period. See https://goo.gl/H3AA3o for the detail.

9 Some can be concerned about including the first- and the second-generation immigrants into the same category. For example, the assimilation theory posits that immigrants become similar to natives as time elapses (Waters and Jiménez 2005), which produces distinctive political attitudes between the first- and the second-generation immigrants (e.g., Pietsch and McAllister 2016). In contrast, the segmented assimilation theory suggests the possibility that the second generation deliberately preserves the immigrant community’s values and solidarity (Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou 1997). For example, Safi (2010) suggests that immigrants’ dissatisfaction does not diminish with time or across generations. Our analysis also shows that there is no significant difference between the first and the second generation in their response to inequality. We present the detailed findings in the emprical section.

10 For interested readers, the correlation coefficient between Economic Inequality and non-Australian born population is -0.06.

11 As robustness checks, (a) we examine models with different sets of control variables; and (b) we consider other measures of local inequality such as income share of the top 1 per cent and top 5 per cent. The results are substantively identical across different specifications. See Tables C and D in Supplementary Material for details.

12 Note that panel (b) in Figure 2 shows that Economic Inequality does not have significant effect over the immigration attitudes of the native citizens. We also estimate the models in column (3) and (4) in Table 2 for the natives. See Table E and Figure A in Supplementary Information. Therefore, we focus on the immigration citizens hereafter.

13 Alternatively, the group conflict theory suggests that economic threat perceptions can be formed at the group level (Blumer 1958; Quillian 1995). Members of the dominant group (e.g., immigrant citizens) may consider that certain resources belong to them. When members of minority groups (e.g., new immigrants) are perceived to taking these resources, members of the majority group are likely to react with hostility. From this perspective, even the highest income earners should become opposed to immigration as inequality increases. The empirical pattern in panel (c), however, does not fit this prediction as well.

14 As a reviewer correctly points out, the analysis in this section originates from theoretical considerations that the heterogeneity among immigrant citizens in terms of the degree of assimilation and personal background may provide important source of variations in their immigration attitudes. However, due to space concern, we present the results of empirical analysis rather than fully integrating them within the theoretical framework of this paper.

15 Estimation outcomes are reported in Table F in Supplementary Information.

16 The AES presents 14 different possible reasons for migration to Australia and asks respondents to choose all that apply.

17 Figure 2 is drawn based on the estimates from the different subsets; thus we cannot tell whether the difference in the marginal effects across subgroups are statistically significant directly. In this sense, we also examine the three models using the first generation, those who stay longer than 35 year, and immigrants with North European origin as a baseline compared to the second generation, those who stay less than 35 years, and non-North European immigrants. Estimation outcomes are reported in Table G in Supplementary Information. The insignificance of three interaction terms suggests that intra-group difference is not statistically significant.