IT IS THE EYES AND NOT THE SIZE THAT MATTER

ABSTRACT

The number of immigrants to Western Europe has been increasing, with immigration the subject of much controversy in contemporary Europe. In this article, we investigate the relationship between the size of the immigrant population, how natives perceive this size, and their anti-immigrant attitudes. We use data from the 2002/2003 European Social Survey covering 17 Western European countries, and we find that as a rule Western Europeans think that the immigrant population in their country is much larger than it actually is. The perceived size of an immigrant population has an impact on anti-immigrant prejudices, but the real size does not. Like many authors before us, we find that education reduces prejudice. However, we also find that around 10 percent of the total effect of education is a result of educated individuals' more accurate views about size of immigrant populations. In other words, the effect of education on prejudice is in part mediated by size perceptions.

Keywords:

• immigrants
• immigration
• prejudice
• size
• size perceptions
• education
• knowledge

Notes

¹Although, as we shall see, not necessarily information about size of minority populations.

²The dataset was made available by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services.

³The database is available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/23/34792376.xls. For 13 out of the 17 countries included, the data are taken from a population census or from the population registers. German data are taken from the microcensus, Belgian data from the General Socio-Economic Survey, Finnish data from population statistics, and Dutch data from the Labour Force Survey.

⁴Our main focus is on anti-immigrant prejudice of members of majority ethnic groups in the countries we analyse, and we therefore also remove non-immigrant individuals declaring themselves as belonging to an ethnic minority group from analyses. However, this has virtually no influence on our analyses, as the group in question is very small (342 individuals, about 1 percent of the total sample).

⁵An accessible presentation of differences between multilevel models and clustering-corrected standard errors can be found in Primo et al. (2007).

⁶There are several ways to measure the size of immigrant population in the country. We had to opt for percentage of foreign-born individuals since that is definition that was used in ESS survey question that is basis for our measure of perceived size. However, it is possible that respondents think of so-called ‘visible minorities’ when asked about immigrant populations, disregarding of clearly stated survey question and including the descendents of non-European immigrants. Thus, Silke Schneider is probably right when stating that improvement in measures of immigrant size should ideally be based on parents’ country of birth, so that also ‘second-generation immigrants’ might be included (Schneider 2008: 63). In other words, overperceptions of sizes of immigrant populations in countries that have large numbers of ‘second generation’ of non-European descent are perhaps partly caused by respondents’ inclusion of these in their immigrant size estimates.

⁷We calculated two measures for the misperceptions. The first one expresses misperceptions simply as the difference between the perceived and the real size (i.e., in percentage points). The second expresses misperceptions as a proportion of the real size (in percent).

⁸The UN estimates for 2002 show that 12.3 percent of the population in the USA was foreign-born (Borjas and Crisp 2005: 1).

⁹None of the covariances among exogenous variables is assumed to be zero.

¹⁰In multilevel regression analysis, the usual recommendation is to have at least 10 level-2 observations per level-2 predictor (Bryk and Raudenbush 1992).

¹¹It should be noted that this effect may not solely be a result of better factual knowledge of highly educated individuals. Other possible explanations include lower innumeracy among highly educated, lower overestimates of immigrant size due to prejudice, and lower proportion of immigrants in richer neighbourhoods (in which the highly educated tend to live).

¹²More correct specification of the model would include a causal path from ‘real size’ to measure(s) of contact. We were able to estimate one such model, with dummy variable ‘several immigrant colleagues’ as measure of contact, and it turned out that real size has a positive effect on contact (β=0.183; P=0.013), but the main results of analysis otherwise remained essentially the same. A problematic aspect with this model is low value of Comparative Fit Index (CFI=0.345).

¹³To some degree, the strong effect of education might also be a result of educated individuals' reluctance to admit anti-immigrant prejudice.

¹⁴Nevertheless, one could argue that strong effects of immigrant size on prejudice would show, even with modest sample sizes on country-level. Therefore, if there are any effects of size on prejudice, they are probably quite weak.

¹⁵One should keep in mind that the presence of this effect can not be disregarded, and that the effects of perceived size on prejudice estimated in our models might be somewhat upward biased.