Understanding ethnic prejudice in Canada: insights into status anxiety and middle-class nation-building through immigration

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the concept of ethnic prejudice to examine the extent to which fears and anxieties related to immigration and ethnic diversity constitute obstacles to middle-class nation-building in Canada. Our underlying assumption is that if immigration is so contentious and the status anxiety it induces so great, then it should manifest into substantial levels of ethnic prejudice. Moreover, if status anxiety induced by immigration is indeed a widespread concern in Canada, we expect it to translate to significant differences in ethnic prejudice between class and immigration status. To measure ethnic prejudice, we developed an index using common factor analysis with the Provincial Diversity Project. This dataset allows us to create a robust index of ethnic prejudice based on the individual attitudes regarding eight different ethnic groups. While our findings indicate that ethnic prejudice in Canada remains relatively low for the time being, it is evident that a certain level of ethnic prejudice persists and intersects with other forms of status anxieties and competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic prejudice
• status anxiety
• middle class
• nation-building
• multiculturalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, as well as all the participants to the conference Middle Class Nation-building Through Immigration? that was held there from September 21-23, 2022.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The Provincial Diversity Project dataset is available through the Ontario Data Documentation Extraction Service and Infrastructure (ODESI). https://search2.odesi.ca/

Notes

1 Unfortunately, data is not currently available to examine the ethnic prejudice index diachronically. Ideally, if the data were available, it would have been possible to examine the evolution of the index before and after the recent wave of right-wing populism. While some datasets contain variables dealing with these issues, none of them have the series of variables needed to reproduce this index.

2 It should also be noted that both the English and French categories have an unacceptably high percentage of missing values (60% and 30% respectively).

3 If more than one dimension had been identified, from a theoretical basis, we would have expected a low degree of correlation between them.

4 We excluded the attitudes toward the charter groups when citing the range.

5 It was necessary to amalgamate these two levels to get a sufficient sample size.

6 Unlike the previous tables, this one is accompanied by a two-way ANOVA, testing income, education and the interaction between the two. All three effects are highly significant.

7 Unfortunately, the Provincial Diversity Project does not contain measures of subjective class.

8 For reasons of parsimony, we have amalgamated the percentage of the very and moderately negative categories into this negative category for tables 8 and 9.

9 Unfortunately, the data does not allow us to confirm whether the level of prejudice in the immigration population changes with the number of years living in the new country.