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Articles

Acceptable and Unacceptable Immigrants: How Opposition to Immigration in Britain is Affected by Migrants' Region of Origin

Pages 1017-1037
Published online: 26 Apr 2011
 

Comparative European research has established that public opposition to immigration is widespread and politically important. However, most existing research has suffered from a serious methodological shortcoming: it employs aggregate measures of attitudes to immigrants, which do not distinguish between different migrant groups. This paper corrects this shortcoming by examining disaggregated British attitudes to migration from seven different regions. I find evidence for a consistent hierarchy of preferences between immigrant groups, with white and culturally more proximate immigrant groups less opposed than non-white and culturally more distinct immigrants. The differences in attitudes to the various migrant groups are very large, calling into question the reliability of analyses which employ aggregate measures of attitudes to immigration. Both total opposition to migration and discrimination between migrant groups decline during the period examined. This is the result of large generational differences in attitudes to immigrants, which are in turn the consequence of cohort differences in education levels, ethnic diversity and, in particular, value orientations. Younger Britons, who are on average less authoritarian and ethnocentric, oppose immigration less and regard different immigrant groups more equally.

Notes

1. Around 100,000 Britons emigrated annually to the EU throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with France and Spain accepting the majority.

2. The British Social Attitudes surveys are fielded to a stratified random sample of the British population. Sample sizes are between 1,750 and 3,500. Response rates range between 60 and 70 per cent. Further technical details can be found in Jowell et al. (1995 Jowell, R., Curtice, J., Park, A., Brook, L. and Ahrendt, D. 1995. British Social Attitudes: The 12th Report, Aldershot: Dartmouth.  [Google Scholar]).

3. Ranging from 2 per cent for Asian immigration to 11 per cent for Australian immigration. An ordered logistic regression analysis using all three response categores produced very similar results to those presented.

4. Ethnocentrism questions were not asked to non-white respondents, so it is not possible to control for ethnocentrism and ethnic diversity at the same time. The reported diversity coefficients were therefore generated in separate models which excluded ethnocentrism.

5. Calculated using the Clarify programme (Tomz et al. 2001 Tomz , M. , Wittenberg , J. and King , G. 2001 CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, Version 2.0 . Cambridge, MA Harvard University , http://gking.harvard.edu  [Google Scholar]).

6. For education, the change is from the levels of the pre-1920s generation to the levels of the most-highly educated cohort (1950s). The levels of education in subsequent cohorts are artificially depressed, as many respondents were still in education when interviewed. We make the conservative assumption that the youngest cohort would end up at least as educated as its predecessors.

7. Tilley (2005) finds evidence that the decline in authoritarian values decelerates among cohorts who came of of age in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the differences in support for authoritarian values between older and younger generations indicate that an aggregate shift towards lower authoritarianism is still likely to continue for decades, as the most authoritarian older cohorts gradually die off.

 

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