The Link Between Income and Xenophobia

According to the World Bank (2019), close to half the world’s population lives in countries where development goals are hindered by conflict and violence. The UNHCR (2019) claims that by the end of 2018, 70.8 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes, of whom at least 25.9 million are refugees. As conflict-induced migration widens in scope, many countries are being forced to confront the challenges that accompany large inflows of people. A paper by Young, Loebach, and Korinek in Social Science Research examines immigration policy attitudes as contingent on three key contexts: the economy, culture, and national security. This understanding is crucial at a time when there are contentious debates on international community, nationhood, and borders in an increasingly globalized world.

The paper uses multi-level logistic regression models to determine the macro- and micro-level effects of economic, cultural, and security contexts on immigration attitudes. Building on existing research that focuses on the correlation of restrictionist immigration attitudes and individual-level competition for resources or the perceived threat to cultural homogeneity, the authors emphasize “embeddedness” as a determinant of preferences for open or closed borders. They study the features of the nation-state, and national and global systems in which individuals are rooted, to explain variations in immigration responses.

At a national level, the authors hypothesize that greater immigration restriction is associated with negative economic conditions (measured by GDP per capita), a large or rapidly growing immigrant population, and the threat to public safety (measured by the number and recency of terrorist events). At an individual level, low income and education levels and a strong sense of community or national pride are thought to be linked with restrictionist attitudes. The authors conduct an analysis of the association of these independent variables with immigration skepticism—“the extent to which individuals favour openness or restriction towards immigrants”—both within and across countries, allowing them to capture the country-specific drivers of immigrant attitudes and make cross-national comparisons.

Controlling for age, sex, and migration streams, the data show that 46 percent of countries exhibit restrictionist attitudes while 54 percent demonstrate more open attitudes. The most restrictive attitudes are found in the Pacific Islands region (68 percent), while the least restrictive are in Latin America and Eastern Europe (42 percent). At a country level, Malaysia is the most restrictive (91 percent) while Rwanda is the least restrictive (10 percent).

The authors find that GDP and anti-immigration sentiment have a statistically significant, positive correlation. Finding that lower-income countries were the least restrictive while middle-income countries demonstrated the most restrictive immigrant attitudes, the authors speculate that lower-income countries attract fewer immigrants and therefore the perceived threat from immigration is low. In contrast, middle-income countries see immigrants as a barrier to goal achievement, and therefore demonstrate the most anti-immigrant attitudes.

In the social context, the assumption was that a large or rapidly growing immigrant population would lead to a perceived threat to cultural homogeneity and an erosion of values. Contrary to this, the study shows that the number of immigrants as a percentage of population and the increase in percent-change of immigrant population is uncorrelated with immigrant skepticism. Adding nuance to this association, multivariate regression shows that a one percent increase in immigrant population is associated with a 15 percent decrease in support for stricter immigration laws, and a 25 percent decrease in support for entirely prohibitive laws. This finding supports contact theory: greater interaction between native and immigrant populations leads to less hostile perceptions of immigrants. At the individual level, as predicted, strong identification with the nation-state or local community is positively correlated with anti-immigrant attitudes.

The most consistent predictor is the context of public security. Countries that experience acts of terrorism are more likely to favor restrictionist immigration policy. The study finds that for every terrorist act, support for restrictionism increases by one percent. Recency is a key factor in this association. Terrorism that occurred more than five years prior is not associated with attitudes towards immigration.

Individual level indicators are more consistent in their predictions than macro-level predictors and are also consistent across countries. Macro indicators show greater variance, supporting the hypothesis that embeddedness plays a significant role in shaping immigrant attitudes. The embeddedness theory highlights the fact that the framing of issues in media or politics, such as the change in composition of population or the influx of immigrants, significantly impacts perceived threats from immigrants.

The public discourse on immigration affects the integration of immigrants into destination communities and has implications for inter-group relations and conflict. The authors emphasize the need to understand macro-level factors and the drivers of societal anxiety towards out-groups. Global comparative analyses including this study provide insight into the elements of national and individual experiences that create variation in immigrant policy attitudes. This understanding is needed to create grounds for rigorous public debate on issues of international responsibility and national borders when it comes asylum and migration.

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Article Source: Young, Yvette, Peter Loebach and Kim Korinek. 2018. “Building walls or opening borders? Global immigration policy attitudes across economic, cultural and human security contexts.” Social Science Research 75: 83-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.06.006.

Featured Image created by: Gloria Dorame