Public Opinion toward Immigration and the EU: How are Turkish Immigrants Different than Others?

Abstract

Public preferences on immigration and attitudes toward the European Union (EU) have been shown to be closely related. In this article, it is argued that, to better understand this relationship, people's opposition to immigration should be differentiated based on the ethnicity of the prospective immigrant group. Specifically, in the case of Germany, Turkish immigrants constitute a special case. The results of the original survey experiment conducted in Germany suggest that, controlling for other explanations, categorizing immigration attitudes by ethnic group reveals that fear of EU enlargement and future Turkish immigration is actually a more important reason for Euroskepticism than has been shown so far. That is, people's opposition to immigrants from Turkey explains their overall Euroskepticism much better than their attitudes toward immigrants from within EU member states, suggesting that their attitudes are informed by opposition to further enlargement rather than a general dislike of multiculturalism.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Aaron Abbarno, Cengiz Erişen and Ciğdem Şirin for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

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Yavcan Ural, “Who are the Immigrants in Germany.”

Hence, a weaker relationship between immigration and Euroscepticism for those who considered an Eastern or Western European immigrant group.

While the sample is more representative than a student sample caution should still be exercised when generalizing these results. The sample is drawn from a cosmopolitan city in Germany and consists of more urban, more educated, more well and three times more former Easterners.

For this study, only the ethnic group manipulation will be discussed as the rest of the manipulations were related to hypotheses of another study.

Dr Libor Spacek, http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/mv/allfaces/index.html

To avoid possible ordering effects, the EU integration questions were asked before the EU enlargement questions.

For this purpose, I used the lincom command in Stata, which computes confidence intervals for linear combinations of coefficients.