Premium
Thinking Globally about Attitudes to Immigration: Concerns about Social Conflict, Economic Competition and Cultural Threat
Author(s) -
Dennison James,
Geddes Andrew
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the political quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-923X
pISSN - 0032-3179
DOI - 10.1111/1467-923x.13013
Subject(s) - immigration , opposition (politics) , immigration policy , european social survey , competition (biology) , unemployment , perception , world values survey , conflict resolution , political science , group conflict , politics , development economics , political economy , social psychology , sociology , economics , economic growth , psychology , ecology , neuroscience , law , biology
This article looks globally at the motivations behind attitudes to immigration. Such motivations have been typically conceptualised by academics either in terms of the ‘economic competition’ or ‘cultural threat’ that immigrants are perceived to pose to the individual or their ‘in‐group’. We propose and test a third possibility: that support for or opposition to immigration is determined by one's perceptions of immigration's effects on social conflict. Using the 2017–2020 World Values Survey (WVS) for forty‐nine countries, we show that: in most countries, globally, citizens are more likely to agree than disagree that immigration leads to social conflict; levels of concern about the effects of immigration on social conflict are higher than those regarding unemployment or culture in sixteen—disproportionately economically developed—countries; concern about social conflict is conceptually and distributionally distinct; belief that immigration leads to social conflict predicts immigration policy preferences; but, uniquely, is positively predicted by higher education. Our findings highlight the importance of institutional conflict resolution capacity, including those related to integration, for the politics of migration.