Dual allegiances? immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration

Abstract

This article develops a model of immigrants’ attitudes towards immigration. We focus on two competing motivations to explain these attitudes: while kinship, solidarity, and shared experiences with other immigrants should lead to more favorable attitudes towards immigration, formal integration into a new society may create a new allegiance to the host country that produces more critical views toward immigration. Using the European Social Survey (ESS) 1–5 data collected 2002–11 in 18 West European democracies, coarsened exact matching (CEM), and multilevel estimation techniques, our analyses reveal that foreigners support immigration more than natives. However, newcomers who have acquired citizenship in their host countries are more skeptical about the consequences of immigration and admitting new arrivals than noncitizen immigrants. This negative relationship between citizenship and support for immigration is particularly pronounced among those who are dissatisfied with their host country’s macroeconomy