Conference Agenda

Pripp Vladimir 1

1 School of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, PhD Student, Bucharest, Romania; vlpripp@gmail.com

This research started from Mattei Doggan’s paradigm, according to which, trust in state institutions is plummeting. The struggles faced by the EU such as wars, medical, financial and refugees crises, have shaken peoples’ trust in both national and European institutions, and in their ability to manage tensioned situations.

Migration is a global phenomenon which has been extensively researched on a general level, emphasize being put mostly on western countries, with strong economies. However, migration towards less economically developed states is fairly undocumented. Former communist countries from Europe, which have experienced a population exodus in the last decades, only recently became places of interest for migrants.

Being a relatively new phenomenon, there are mostly crude data, generally concerning immigration from a numerical perspective and not from the population’s point of view. Thus, the main issues with this subject are the lack of both data and literature. This research, which analyses the immigration phenomenon from the locals’ perspective, provides valuable insights to the aforementioned domain, by presenting not only citizens’ attitudes towards immigration, but also predictors of negative and positive attitudes towards this phenomenon.

This paper provides an in-depth analysis which identifies what factors form the attitudes that French, Portuguese, Hungarians and Polish people have towards migrants, especially those who belong to a different race or ethnic group than the majority of the population.

The research method which I used in this paper is secondary data analyses. For this research, I have used two different databases. The main database was the European Social Survey. In my research I have included the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Rounds of the ESS. For the first type of data, I concentrated on the core topics, which evaluated on one hand, peoples’ trust in national and international institutions, and on the other hand, their attitude towards migrants of a different race or ethnicity. The second database used in this research was the Standard Eurobarometer, from which I included data collected twice a year, since 2012 up to 2020, which mostly evaluated trust in national and supranational organizations.

I started with frequencies and crosstabs, to present the general attitudes towards migration and trust in institutions. Afterwords, I used Pearson Correlation, regression and factorial analyses in order to identify the attitude predictors towards immigration based on trust in national (Parliament, Legal System, Police and European institutions.

Eastern Europeans, Polish and Hungarians, have mixed feelings, while western Europeans, Portuguese and French generally have, a positive perception of immigrants. Eastern Europeans who trust EU have more positive attitudes towards immigrants than the Western europeans. In general, westerners have more trust in EU and in their national institutions and have a better perception of immigrants than easterners who trust European institutions.

According to the theories of cultural assimilation, immigrants tend to become similar to the native population in a set of values and attitudes, notwithstanding some heterogeneity due to ethnic and religious profiles, gender, and economic integration. In this regard, several studies have provided empirical evidence – for instance - on attitudes toward gender equality and homosexuality, religiosity, institutional and social trust.

This presentation takes a step forward to analyze immigrants' attitudes toward immigrant groups themselves and the general phenomenon of immigration. The choice of analyzing immigrants' attitudes toward other immigrants may sound odd; nonetheless, it represents an original and intriguing perspective. Indeed, according to the group empathy theory, since immigrants share common life experiences they should have more positive attitudes toward other immigrants. Because of this, in the case we find some assimilation patterns also regarding these attitudes, we would provide a strong argument for interpreting such assimilatory processes as very broad and general. If assimilation exists, we would expect an exacerbation of hostile attitudes within immigrant populations themselves as long as they stay in the country of destination. Accordingly, among the most integrated or the more culturally similar to the natives, anti-immigration attitudes should be analogous to the natives’ ones.

Moving from this theoretical framework, we take advantage of the full set of European Social Survey data and identify natives, first- and second-generation migrants by combining information about respondents’ and their parents’ country of birth, along with information about the length of stay in the destination country. As the dependent variable, we refer to the scale of anti-immigration attitudes that has been broadly used (and validated) in many previous contributions.

Results show strong evidence for cultural assimilation. Overall, immigrants exhibit more positive attitudes toward the immigrant population than natives, but attitudes toward immigrants tend to become more negative when moving from first to second generations and from second generations to natives. Moreover, this pattern can be observed also when moving from first generations who recently migrated to first generations who settled longer before. A partial exception to this pattern is represented by Muslim migrants who exhibit fewer negative attitudes toward immigration in general. They require the transition from the first to the second generation to begin showing signs of assimilation, while the assimilation within the first generation does not happen. Finally, we also show that the influence of educational level - the strongest predictor among the native population - on attitudes toward immigrants increases and becomes similar to that for natives when moving from first- to second-generation migrants.

All things considered, we provide robust evidence for a very compelling test for the cultural assimilation theory: even when focusing on (negative) attitudes toward immigrants, strong signals of assimilation are found, indicating that this process is broad and general. Also, our results suggest a progressive loss of empathy toward other immigrant groups among the immigrants themselves.

(Mis)perceptions and identities are often more relevant in terms of immigration attitude formation than rational considerations or economic interests. While generally immigration attitudes are influenced by numerous factors beyond media frames and political preferences, recent trends have showed how important these factors prove to be. Therefore, in my research I focus on the influence of media consumption habits on immigration attitudes from a comparative perspective in two radical contexts: Germany and Hungary. I investigate how various media sources (radio, televison, newspaper, online) contribute to the increase or decrease in anti-immigration attitudes. In order to provide a complex analysis, I include every ESS round into my regression models, which is possible because of the consistent measurement of these factors. Ordinary least square (OLS) regression models are estimated with standard errors clustered around the country year variables. A more decisive influence of various media sources are expected in the Hungarian context, where media centralization and partisan ownership reformulated the content of television and radio most importantly.

Native populations of European countries are divided regarding whether their country should be more open or closed to the entrance of new immigrants. As we have seen in recent years, the answer to this question depends, among others, on the origin of the immigrants. When it comes to immigrants from poorer countries outside Europe or to individuals perceived as belonging to groups distinctively different, attitudes tend to be more hostile than when the immigrants are perceived as similar to the native population. The reasons behind these attitudes are well studied and documented. However, considering that immigration in Europe has been on the rise since the 1990s, and in some countries earlier still, and that the impact of immigrants on hosting societies, including their resident immigrant minorities is in the order of the day, we believe it is essential to consider not only the attitudes of the native population towards new immigrants, but also those of immigrants. In this study we investigate two alternative mechanisms that may shape immigration attitudes among individuals with an immigration history: autochthony (the belief in first commers’ entitlements) and cultural solidarity (the identification with ‘my brothers’). Using representative samples of 30 countries that participated in rounds 8 to 10 of the ESS (R’s with immigrant background=17,011), we find that respondents with an immigrant background always show lower levels of exclusion compared with natives. More specifically we see that autochthony does imply decreasing differences from the natives. There are no significant differences in exclusion between first- and second-generation immigrants, regardless of how long the former live in the country of immigration, and second-generation immigrants do not differ significantly from natives. In addition, there is weak, yet significant, indication that immigrants of a European origin, show lower levels of exclusion than natives when it comes to receiving new immigrants “of the same ethnic or racial group”. Respondents of a non-European origin show lower levels of exclusion compared to natives when it comes to receiving immigrants from a “different ethnic or racial group”. Exclusion levels among respondents of a non-European origin are significantly lower than those of respondents of a European origin. The difference is, however, very small. The paper will discuss these and further preliminary findings.