Intra-European immigrants' attitudes towards non-European immigration

Ognjen Obucina , Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

This study analyzes intra-European immigrants' attitudes towards non-European immigration. The principal goal is to explore whether and how these attitudes are shaped by the attitudes towards non-European immigration among natives in both sending and receiving countries. The theoretical discussion is centered around the concepts of conformity and counter-conformity. The conformity hypothesis predicts that the attitudes towards non-European immigration among natives at destination and among intra-European immigrants residing in the same country are positively associated, whereas the opposition hypothesis predicts a negative association. • The home country hypothesis stresses the importance of social norms in the country of origin and predicts that European immigrants’ attitudes towards non-European immigration are positively associated with the attitudes expressed by natives in their home country. The empirical analysis is based on repeated cross-sectional data from nine waves of the European Social Survey (ESS). The sample consists of around 23,000 intra-European immigrants (European-born men and women living in Europe, in a country other than their country of birth) living in 38 European countries. The main analysis is based on multilevel multinomial regressions with a three-level structure. The results support the conformity hypothesis and the home country hypothesis as intra-European migrants' attitudes are positively associated with natives' views at both destination and origin. However, the magnitudes of the coefficients suggest that the role of natives’ attitudes in the receiving context is more important than that in the sending context.

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 Presented in Session 4. Migrant Populations: attitudes and contextual factors