What determines the shape of migrant and non-migrant populations’ attitudes toward immigration in Europe?

Many European societies have become more ethnically and nationally diverse in recent decades. The number of people residing in an EU Member State with citizenship of a non-member country in 2021 was 23.7 million, in addition to 13.7 million persons with citizenship of another EU Member State (Eurostat 2022). Attitudes toward immigration have, therefore, become a salient electoral issue in the last decade in many European countries. However, they are usually investigated from the perspective of the majority population (Dražanová 2022; Schneider 2008; Seymonov et al. 2006). The naturalization of an important share of immigrants and their descendants and the expansion of voting rights to non-nationals (Schmid et al. 2019) has led to a considerable size of a new electorate in European societies. Therefore, it is crucial to study interethnic relations not only between migrant and non-migrant populations but also among different migrant groups countries, such as migrants already settled in as well as newcomers.

Compared to the plentiful studies regarding the majority’s attitudes toward immigration, there is still much less research on migrants’ immigration attitudes. Notwithstanding, those studies that, in fact, study immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration (for example Hindriks, Verkuyten and Coenders 2014; Meeusen, Abts and Meuleman 2019) usually do so on exclusively migrant samples, without comparing them to those of natives. Existing studies explicitly looking at differences between nonmigrants and immigrants’ attitudes (Huber and Oberdabernig 2016; Becker 2019; Sarrasin et al. 2018) have found that they might be shaped by distinct factors. It is, therefore, essential to investigate whether the determinants of attitudes toward immigration may work differently for diverse segments of increasingly multicultural societies. This is important for our deeper understanding of social cohesion, social inclusion and intergroup conflict, since former immigrants typically have an equal vote in designing the immigration policy of tomorrow. Moreover, previous research set in Europe has mostly been conducted as single-country studies (see for instance Hindriks, Verkuyten and Coenders (2014) for the case of Netherlands, Meeusen, Abts and Meuleman (2019) for Belgium and Sarrasin et al. (2018) for Switzerland). It is however crucial to test the validity of these findings in a cross-country design as well as broaden our findings beyond the Western European focus.

Theoretically, immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration can be attributed to intergroup solidarity or intergroup competition (Meeusen, Abts and Meuleman 2019). For instance, immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities may be more favorable to immigration than non-migrant individuals because they can identify more strongly with other immigrants due to their own migration history or similar outgroup status (Becker 2019). Moreover, Hindriks, Verkuyten and Coenders (2014) show that immigrants’ attitudes toward other minorities vary and that those sharing the same religion and having more contact manifested more positive attitudes toward each other. On the other hand, when immigrants perceive scarcity (of resources such as jobs or welfare) or competition from other immigrant groups, they may, similarly to the majority, start to police national boundaries (Just and Anderson 2015; Kolbe and Crepaz 2016).

This article investigates attitudes toward immigration among first- and second-generation immigrants as well as non-migrants in 20 countries, including Eastern and Southern European ones. Our contribution to the literature is three-fold. Firstly, we investigate whether first- and secondgeneration immigrants tend to be pro- or anti-immigration, and how these attitudes compare to the non-migrant population across Europe. Thus, we also test which of the two theoretical frameworks generating two opposing predictions regarding immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration find support empirically in the European context. This includes examining whether positive or negative attitudes vary with regard to different types of immigration attitudes and different types of immigrant outgroups. Secondly, we examine whether apart from factors usually theorized to affect the nonmigrant population’s attitudes (e.g., education, socio-economic class) minority-specific factors (e.g., perceptions of belonging to a discriminated group and language spoken at home) affect first- and second- generations’ attitudes toward immigration differently than those of non-migrants who also share these attributes. While there have already been studies regarding how stigma and perceived discrimination (Craig and Richeson 2012; Gaertner and Dovidio 2000) affect interminority attitudes, explicit comparisons of how these factors might work differently for the non-migrant versus migrant population are missing. Thirdly, we also examine whether first-generation immigrants´ attitudes toward immigration change depending on the length of their tenure.

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