The International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) commissioned the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the European University Institute to provide this report in early 2018, based on the work of the MPC’s Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration (OPAM). This built on the insight and recommendations of the first EuroMed Migration Communications Study—‘How does the media on both sides of the Mediterranean report on migration?’ This second study aims to:
• Offer a better understanding of public attitudes to migration in 17 selected countries on both sides of the Mediterranean;
• Attempt to explain why attitudes to migration are what they are — with an emphasis on the role of media. The report both summarises previous findings and provides new analyses;
• Provide recommendations on how to communicate on migration in a non-polarising manner.
A better understanding of public attitudes to migration
The report includes a comprehensive data inventory of all extant quantitative evidence of attitudes to immigration and emigration in all 17 countries since 2010. For the Southern Partner Countries (SPCs), this includes 35 datasets. In Europe, where such surveys are considerably more common and exclusively focused on immigration, sources were divided into three groups: international academic surveys; national academic surveys; and commercial polling companies.
The key findings about what attitudes to migration are include the following:
• In Europe, contrary to popular belief, attitudes to immigration are not becoming more negative. Rather, they are notably stable and, in recent years, have become more positive.
• What emerges unambiguously is that Europeans everywhere want immigrants who are able to assimilate socially, labour market issues like professional qualifications are considered important but less so, while racial and religious backgrounds are considered unimportant.
• Unlike preferences about immigration, the perceived importance of the issue of immigration is volatile and has risen sharply across Europe. As such, it will likely continue to dominate national and European elections discourses in 2019. In this context, voters most concerned about immigration—who often already held anti-immigration attitudes—are more likely to vote for anti-immigration parties, even when these parties do not align with other issues they believe in.
• Europeans increasingly associate the EU with not enough control at external borders, though far less so than with freedom of movement. At the same time, major Southern host countries must contend with persistently critical domestic attitudes towards the hosted displaced populations of concern.
Based on the data available it emerges that attitudes to immigration tend to be more negative in the southern Mediterranean than in Europe, though here there are important geographical differences. In the Middle East, Lebanese, Palestinian and Jordanian citizens tend to more strongly prefer not living next to foreigners. In the North of Africa, by contrast, this preference is weaker.
Comparatively, the Germans, Spanish and Swedes tend to report significantly lower rates. Even starker is the divide when respondents are asked whether employers should give priority to national citizens over immigrants. Significant majorities of Jordanians, Egyptians, Moroccans and Tunisians answer in the affirmative, whereas only a slight majority of Spaniards and minorities of Germans and Swedes do likewise. On emigration, there is less national variation. Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Moroccans, Jordanians, Algerians and Tunisians all lay somewhere between 15% and 33%. There is a lack of data on EU member states in this regard.
Read the full report here.
