Trust in People and Attitudes Towards Immigration

We use data from the European Social Survey (ESS) Rounds 1-7 to investigate the relationship between trust in people and attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. Our analysis is based on large longitudinal comparative survey data (ESS), where the immigrant attitudes are operationalized by two groups of items: the attitude toward immigrants (“To what extent do you think [country] should allow people of the same race or ethnic group as most of [country]’s people to come and live here?“; “To what extent do you think [country] should allow people of a different race or ethnic group as most of [country]’s people to come and live here?“; “To what extent do you think [country] should allow people of poorer countries in Europe to come and live here?“) and the attitude toward immigration (“Would you say it is generally bad or good for [country]’s economy that people come to live here from other countries?”; “Would you say that [country]’s cultural life is generally undermined or enriched by people coming to live here from other countries?”; Is [country] made a worse or a better place to live by people coming to live here from other countries?”). We constructed a structural equations model comprised of three intercorrelated latent variables. Each latent variable was supported by three items from the ESS questionnaire. Latent variables represented factors and factor loadings for all items that were higher than 0.65, suggesting satisfactory factor stability for all three factors. These results show that the questions in the ESS questionnaire that targeted respective attitudes and values (immigrants, immigration, trust) are consistent and that each triplet measures a common underlying factor. We performed structural equations modelling (SEM) with three latent variables – attitudes towards immigrants, attitudes towards immigration and trust in people. We studied the correlations between the variables. The model fit for this model was satisfactory. RMSEA was 0.028, and CFI was 0.995. In the second step, we performed a multi-group SEM analysis. We introduced 32 groups, with each group representing data from one country. First, we tested an unconstrained model. We obtained 32 triplets of correlations. The fit of this model was satisfactory. RMSEA was 0.006, and CFI was 0.992. The strengths of the correlations varied, but all of the correlations had matching signs. Additionally, in every country, the correlation between attitudes towards immigrants (F1) and attitudes towards immigration (F2) was always the highest of the three in absolute terms. The correlation between attitudes towards immigration (F2) and trust in people (F3) was the second highest, and the correlation between attitudes towards immigration (F1) and trust in people (F3) was always the lowest. We confirm the significance of every one of the three correlations and discuss the possible factors behind these differences. This indicates a consistent pattern of relationships between the three latent variables across the wide range of countries and adds strength to our finding that levels of trust in people are universally related to attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2019, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 34-43. Trust in People and Attitudes Towards Immigration 35 We then put constraints on every correlation coefficient to see whether the countries differ significantly in the strengths of correlations. We built three models, forcing covariances between pairs of latent variables to be equal across the countries, and compared the models using the Chi square test. All three models compared to the unconstrained model had p<0.001, indicating significant differences between the constrained and the unconstrained models. We can conclude that there are significant differences in correlation strengths among the countries. Our analysis shows that although correlation signs and strengths are consistent among people in various countries, significant differences remain in terms of how strongly trust in people and attitudes towards immigrants and immigration are correlated. When we look at an ordered list of the countries according to the strength of correlation between attitudes towards immigration, we find that counties with higher correlations are mostly "older" countries of the EU like Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Counties with lower correlations include countries that are not in the EU (Turkey, the Ukraine) or countries that joined the EU later (Estonia, Lithuania, Croatia, Bulgaria). We can hypothesize that immigration is not perceived as emotionally in the countries that joined later (most of the data have been collected before the current migration crisis); therefore, the fear of immigrants may not be as intense, and the correlation with the underlying factor of feeling secure is not as high.