“Good migrants, bad migrants”: When it comes to immigration into their own country, some people have an ambivalent view of certain people and are more willing to accept them than others. Using survey data from 36 countries, a meta-study has now evaluated which characteristics of immigrant people contribute to their encountering more or less negative prejudices. Accordingly, economic, legal and humanitarian characteristics play an important role. However, the results also reveal contradictions.
Many studies that examine the population’s attitudes towards immigration view migrants as a homogeneous group. However, both in legal practice and in public discourse, immigrant people are often divided into different groups: Did they flee their home country or did they move to a new country to work? Did you enter legally or illegally? And what level of training do they have? These and other factors determine what rights a person gets and what their chances of getting a residence permit are. However, the influence on public acceptance has not yet been comprehensively assessed.
Economic factors shape acceptance
To find out what factors contribute to people preferring some immigrants over others, a team led by Marco Aviña from Harvard University evaluated 100 published and unpublished studies with survey data from 142,817 participants from 36 countries. The respondents were asked to rate the profiles of fictitious people and rate the extent to which they would support the acceptance of the person in question into their own country.
As the researchers found, basic preferences are largely similar across countries and demographic groups: Most respondents said they would be more likely to accept people who had to leave their home country due to war and persecution than because of poor economic prospects. In contrast, illegal entry was considered a strong negative factor. The respondents also cited high professional qualifications and good language skills as positive criteria. “Economic considerations have become more influential over time,” the researchers write.
In contrast, cultural and religious factors played a smaller role. “To our surprise, the meta-analysis showed no effect for cultural similarity between the origin and host countries,” report Aviña and his colleagues. Nevertheless, according to the surveys, people from predominantly Muslim or non-European countries were slightly disadvantaged, as were men, single people without children and older people. Respondents who considered themselves to be more politically conservative placed more value on immigrants coming from countries with the same religious background and similar political norms as the host country. For respondents from the political left, however, these factors played no role.
Conflicting preferences
In an accompanying commentary on the study, a team led by Judit Kende from Tilburg University in the Netherlands points out that the preferences revealed in the analysis are often contradictory: immigrants should prefer to flee war and violence, but at the same time be neither traumatized nor physically disabled – although the risk of this is particularly high among refugees. And even if economic migrants are unpopular, respondents prefer people with a high level of education and stable employment. “Immigrants are therefore expected to contribute to the economy, but not to emigrate to improve their own financial situation,” writes the team of authors led by Kende. “Citizens often view immigrants ambivalently and utilitarianly, even exploitatively.”
The narrative of “good” and “bad” migrants is promoted by politics and the media. “Together, this narrative creates a hierarchy of different migrant groups that reinforces and legitimizes the unequal distribution of rights, resources and status,” criticize Kende and her colleagues. Inadvertently, studies like this one could also help to reinforce such classifications. “While the work itself is clearly not intended to legitimize hierarchies, there is a high risk of abuse by malicious actors,” they write. “The consequences could be serious, particularly given historical experiences in which groups were institutionally socially classified in such formalized ways.”
Source: Marco Aviña (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) et al., Science Advances, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adz2271