Nationalism and Support for Immigrants' Rights Among Adolescents in 25 Countries

Abstract

Adolescents' attitudes toward immigrants develop in tandem with their sense of national identity. In this article we identify factors that influence restrictive views of nationalism and opposition or support for immigrants' rights during young people's formative years, among the generation that comprises today's young adults. Data were analyzed from 77,000 native-born 14-year-olds from 25 countries surveyed in the IEA Civic Education Study of 1999. National indicators of citizenship policies and demographics were incorporated into a multilevel analysis. High levels of protective nationalism were associated with negative attitudes toward immigrants' rights in long-established democracies, but not in newer ones; this relationship was stronger in religiously diverse countries. Adolescents in countries with more restrictive citizenship policies were less supportive of immigrants' rights, although these policies did not moderate the extent to which attitudes to immigrants were correlated with nationalism. The findings illustrate the importance of attention to the national context when studying the development of social attitudes.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid from the University of Minnesota awarded to Katherine Fennelly.

The authors would like to thank Crystal Myslajek for her assistance in this analysis.

Notes

¹It is important to note that the term “realistic group threat” does not mean that the perception that immigrants are the cause of a particular threat is itself realistic, but rather that a realistic threat (such as scarcity of jobs or resources) is perceived to be attributable to an out-group, such as immigrants. Such threats are often the result of the belief that jobs or wages are finite resources.

²It is theorized that countries with higher immigrant populations and higher unemployment rates have a greater sense of collective threat. However, the role of such contextual factors with individual perceptions of threat is less certain. Although Scheepers et al. (2002) found empirical support for threat as a mediator of the association between the social status of individuals within a country and immigrant rights' attitudes, they did not consider explicitly the interaction of threat with contextual factors, or the aggregate level of threat in each nation.

³IEA recently conducted another assessment, the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS). However, the protective nationalism items central to this study were not included in that instrument (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, & Losito, 2010).

⁴Item response theory (IRT) refers to latent variable models in which categorical data (binary or polytomous) are used to estimate a respondent's score on a latent continuum. IRT software allowed us to both test the fit of our proposed scale to the data in each country, and to estimate a scale score based on participants' responses to the items.

Note. All analyses are weighted with a normalized population weight (houseweight). Countries are arrayed with the most negative correlations between the two variables at the top of the table to the most positive correlations at the bottom of the table.

*p < .05.

Note. Unstandardized coefficients are reported; standard errors are in parentheses. Individuals are weighted with a normalized within-country population weight (houseweight), but all countries are weighted equally.

^a Predictor centered on its group mean. All others centered on its grand mean.

^b Uncentered; reference category = medium number of years to democracy.

*p < .05; **p < .01.