Social and Cultural Meanings of Tolerance: Immigration, Incorporation and Identity in Aotearoa, New Zealand

Abstract

Immigration is arguably a contentious issue in New Zealand. A major shift in immigration policy and patterns of immigration has witnessed an anti-immigration backlash and debate over a ‘crisis of national identity’. Drawing data from the 1995 and 2003 National Identity modules of the International Social Survey Programme, this paper examines New Zealanders’ attitudes toward immigration. The results of hierarchical cluster and multiple correspondence analyses show how attitudes toward immigration highlight important social group (i.e. class and ethnicity) differences in beliefs about social incorporation and conceptions of national identity. Positive or negative attitudes toward immigration, therefore, have different meanings depending on broader social and cultural divisions in society. I conclude by relating the findings to processes of social incorporation among immigrants and their descendants.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• National Identity
• New Zealand
• Social Incorporation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Adrian Cruz, Michael Biggs, Xavi Escandell, Matthew Grbic, Shin-Kap Han, Hiromi Ishizawa, Kazuyo Kubo, Tim F. Liao, Tom O'Brien, Jennifer Ortman, Keun-Young Park, Mike Sobczak and three anonymous JEMS reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The meaning of Pākehā, from the Māori language, is two-fold. Firstly, it refers to a category of people—white New Zealanders. Secondly, it refers to a self-ascribed post-colonial ethnic identity among white New Zealanders (for a comprehensive discussion see Fleras and Spoonley 1999; Pearson 2000; Spoonley 1995). In this paper, I use Pākehā as a ‘self-ascribed’ social category to describe the white population. It should also be noted that there is an important debate surrounding the collective vs individual definition of Māori as a social category (Kukutai 2004).

2. Results for each year are available from the author upon request.

3. Two methods of data reduction—factor analysis and cluster analysis—also found the same results. A factor analysis produced a single factor solution and a cluster analysis produced a ‘positive’ and a ‘negative’ grouping of the immigration items. Therefore an additive variable was sufficient for capturing a unidimensional attitude toward immigration.

4. The additive variable, ranging from 5 to 25, was transformed into four categories of equally spaced intervals: 5–9 (6.4 per cent); 10–14 (46.3 per cent); 15–19 (39.4 per cent) and 20–25 (7.9 per cent).

5. Given New Zealand's bi-ethnic (Māori–Pākehā) identity, I use the term ascribed (Jones and Smith 2001) to avoid confusion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Douglas Grbic

Douglas Grbic is a Visiting Scholar in Sociology at George Washington University