Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Europe: Contact, Threat Perception, and Preferences for the Exclusion of Migrants

TLDR

The study reviews contact, group conflict, and symbolic prejudice theories to explain exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants in Western Europe. The authors model the effect of a country’s immigration level on threat perception and exclusionary attitudes. Intimate contact with immigrants lowers willingness to expel them, even after accounting for threat, and mediates the influence of high immigration levels on threat perception.

Abstract

This article introduces the theoretical approaches of contact, group conflict, and symbolic prejudice to explain levels of exclusionary feelings toward a relatively new minority in the West European context, the immigrant. The findings indicate that even after controls for perceived threat are included in the model, intimate contact with members of minority groups in the form of friendships can reduce levels of willingness to expel legal immigrants from the country. A contextual variable, level of immigration to the country, is also introduced into the model because it is likely that this variable affects both threat perception and exclusionary feelings. While context does not seem to directly affect levels of willingness to expel or include immigrants in the society, it does have a rather powerful impact on perceived threat. Perhaps even more importantly, the findings suggest that contact mediates the effect of the environment, helping to produce lower levels of threat perception in contexts of high immigration.