Immigrant integration policy and native adolescents’ attitudes towards ethnic minorities: a comparative study of European Countries

ABSTRACT

This study investigated whether a country’s policy context for immigrant integration was related to native adolescents’ attitudes towards ethnic minorities in European countries, using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. We found that students in a country with more inclusive and multiculturalist policies for immigrant minorities showed more positive attitudes towards ethnic minorities, compared to their counterparts in a country with less inclusive and multiculturalist policies, even after controlling for individual and country characteristics. We also found a significant interaction effect between family socioeconomic status and immigrant integration policies, suggesting that inclusive immigrant integration policies may trigger different reactions among native adolescents depending on their family background. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant integration policies
• adolescence
• attitudes towards ethnic minorities
• family socioeconomic background
• cross-national study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Information on the respondent’s area of residence was derived from the school questionnaires, and the respondent attending a school in a city with a population with more than 100, 000 was defined as an urban resident. Because of the large number of missing values in the ICCS 2009 dataset, we created and took into account a separate category for those with missing information on the area of residence, i.e. missing urbanicity.

2. The direction of these associations is somewhat counterintuitive, but it might be possible that a country’s economic recession and hostile political environment for immigrants might lead native adolescents to believe that more equal rights and opportunities should be granted for immigrant minorities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education;the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2017S1A3A2066878];the Population Research Institute at Penn State University [P2CHD041025];Seoul National University [700-20180022].

Notes on contributors

Hyungryeol Kim

Hyungryeol Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethics Education, College of Education. Her research interests range across civic and citizenship education, political socialization, international comparative education and youth studies.

Soo-yong Byun

Soo-yong Byun is an Associate Professor of Education and Demography at the Pennsylvania State University. His research investigates variations in mechanisms and processes of social stratification across different countries and geographic contexts using large-scale national and international data. .