Immigrant‘s Exclusionist Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Europe

The literature on exclusionist attitudes in Europe has advanced greatly in the last two decades. We have learned much about the underlying mechanisms explaining the emergence of exclusionist attitudes both at the micro and the macro levels of inquiry. Interestingly though, efforts invested in understanding the consequences of the multicultural transformation of Europe, have by and large neglected to study the attitudes of minorities towards this transformation. Thus, most studies explaining the emergence of anti-foreigner sentiments focus attention on members of the majority group, explicitly deleting all migrants from their sample, or implicitly ignoring the fact that some individuals in the sample are of immigrant background.

This study seeks to narrow this gap looking at the attitudes of immigrants and immigrant offspring in Europe towards immigrants. Specifically, I ask whether the European case can provide support for the horizontal hostility hypothesis namely, that individuals of non-European immigrant background will be more exclusionist towards other, newer immigrants of European origin. I test the hypothesis using pooled ESS data for 9 countries over 6 rounds controlling for the usual predictors of exclusion like prejudice, well-being, political identification and socio-economic status. I also control for different immigration relevant predictors like immigrant generation, ethnic identification, citizenship status, and perceived discrimination. Findings indicate first that net of these predictors, the horizontal hostility hypothesis is corroborated. Further, the effect of non-European immigrant origin on the exclusion of (European) immigrants is moderated by prejudice. As prejudice increases, differences between European and non-European immigrants in exclusion probabilities decrease.