The impact of regional differences and anti-immigrant attitudes on exclusionary policy preferences in Europe

The issue of migration regulation is not only a critical point of public debates throughout Europe, it also taps exclusionary sentiments that are easily mobilized by right-wing parties. The present paper is dealing with majority preferences for immigration restriction in Europe in a cross-national and cross-regional multilevel perspective. We distinguish a preference for a quantitative reduction of immigration from the more qualitative approach of selecting immigrants by certain credentials. First, we investigate to what extent these policy demands are tied to country- and region-specific structural differences. Does regional immigrant presence and regional unemployment drive the demand to reduce immigration, or are these policy preferences completely decoupled from these contextual factors? In a second step we inquire to what extent different forms of perceived immigrant threat and prejudice towards immigrants are tied to a demand for curbing immigration. For instance, what is the relative importance of economic and cultural forms of perceived threat for preferring to reduce immigration or to select only certain immigrants? In order to answer these questions, we employ multilevel modeling on data of the first round of the European Social Survey 2002 in conjunction with aggregate data from Eurostat. We furthermore make use of the regional level location variables present in the data set. The results show that immigration reduction preferences are unrelated to immigrant presence within the regions, and regional unemployment plays a significant role only for the inclination towards a numerical reduction of immigration. Economic and cultural concerns are similarly tied to a preference for a numerical reduction of immigration only. For a leaning towards establishing qualitative entry criteria for immigrants, cultural concerns play a larger role. We close with a discussion of the broader social and political implications of some notable differences in the result patterns for the two forms of immigration restriction.