This book compares anti-immigrant attitudes across 8 countries on 5 continents. It develops a general framework that explores grievances, personal interactions, and entrenched beliefs that explain anti-immigrant attitudes. Using original survey research with 1,000 respondents per country, the authors test the salience of their theoretical expectations across eight very diverse cases: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Africa, the USA, and Turkey. The empirical study allows to decipher the degree to which the drivers of anti-immigrant attitudes are universal or context-specific. One the one hand, they find that positive interactions between natives reduce critical attitudes toward immigrants in all 8 countries. On the other hand, there are some country specific differences in the influence of various grievances and the three proxy variables measuring entrenched beliefs populist attitudes, nationalism and social conservativism. This book appeals to scholars and students of political sociology, comparative politics, public opinion research and related fields.

This book explores the causes of public opposition to immigration in three industrialized Western countries.

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on a busy Amsterdam street. His killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan offended by van Gogh's controversial film about Muslim suppression of women. The Dutch government had funded separate schools, housing projects, broadcast media, and community organizations for Muslim immigrants, all under the umbrella of multiculturalism. But the reality of terrorism and radicalization of Muslim immigrants has shattered that dream. In this arresting book, Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn demonstrate that there are deep conflicts of values in the Netherlands. In the eyes of the Dutch, for example, Muslims oppress women, treating them as inferior to men. In the eyes of Muslim immigrants, Western Europeans deny women the respect they deserve. Western Europe has become a cultural conflict zone. Two ways of life are colliding. Sniderman and Hagendoorn show how identity politics contributed to this crisis. The very policies meant to persuade majority and minority that they are part of the same society strengthened their view that they belong to different societies. At the deepest level, the authors' findings suggest, the issue that government and citizens need to be concerned about is not a conflict of values but a clash of fundamental loyalties.

The association of exclusionist and nationalist relations, termed ethnocentrism, has been previously explored within single-country contexts. Studies have shown that dispositional factors, such as social identity and personality traits, affect ethnocentric reactions and that attitudes differ between social categories. However, broader national and international explanations have been neglected in the literature. This book fills this major gap by providing a unique account of the relationship between nationalist attitudes and the exclusion of migrants across a range of European countries, the US, Canada and Australia. Drawing on a variety of comparative surveys, the authors assess whether ethnic exclusionist reactions and nationalist attitudes are indeed systematically related across countries, and whether variations in such attitudes reflect country-level as well as individual-level differences. The authors consider the multidimensionality of the concepts of nationalism and exclusionism as well as the empirical associations, and analyze the attitudes of both majority and minority groups within the countries studied.

Charting the history of US immigration policy from the Puritan colonists to World War II refugees, this text uncovers the arguments of the anti-immigration forces including: warnings against the consequences of overpopulation; and economic concerns that immigrants take jobs away from Americans.

The fight over immigration reform and immigrants’ rights in the U.S. has been marked by sharp swings in both public sentiment and official enforcement. In 2006, millions of Latino immigrants joined protests for immigration reform. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a policy granting work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented immigrants who entered the country before age 16, was enacted in 2012, despite a sharp increase in deportations during the Bush and Obama administrations. The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump prompted a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment which threatened DACA and other progressive immigration policies. In Holding Fast, political scientists James McCann and Michael Jones-Correa investigate whether and how these recent shifts have affected political attitudes and civic participation among Latino immigrants. ​ Holding Fast draws largely from a yearlong survey of Latino immigrants, including both citizens and noncitizens, conducted before and after the 2016 election. The survey gauges immigrants’ attitudes about the direction of the country and the emotional underpinnings of their political involvement. While survey respondents expressed pessimism about the direction of the United States following the 2016 election, there was no evidence of their withdrawal from civic life. Instead, immigrants demonstrated remarkable resilience in their political engagement, and their ties to America remained robust. McCann and Jones-Correa examine Latino immigrants’ trust in government as well as their economic concerns and fears surrounding possible deportations of family members and friends. They find that Latino immigrants who were concerned about the likelihood of deportation were more likely to express a lack of trust in government. Concerns about personal finances were less salient. Disenchantment with the U.S. government did not differ based on citizenship status, length of stay in America, or residence in immigrant-friendly states. Foreign-born Latinos who are naturalized citizens shared similar sentiments to those with fewer political rights, and immigrants in California, for example, express views similar to those in Texas. Addressing the potential influence immigrant voters may wield in in the coming election, the authors point to signs that the turnout rate for naturalized Latino immigrant may be higher than that for Latinos born in the United States. The authors further underscore the importance of the parties' platforms and policies, noting the still-tenuous nature of Latino immigrants’ affiliations with the Democratic Party. Holding Fast outlines the complex political situation in which Latino immigrants find themselves today. Despite well-founded feelings of anger, fear, and skepticism, in general they maintain an abiding faith in the promise of American democracy. This book provides a comprehensive account of Latino immigrants’ political opinions and a nuanced, thoughtful outlook on the future of Latino civic participation. It will be an important contribution to scholarly work on civic engagement and immigrant integration.

A comprehensive treatment of anti-immigration sentiment exploring debate, policies, ideas, and key groups from historical and contemporary perspectives. Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia is one of the first encyclopedias to address American anti-immigration sentiment. Organized alphabetically, the two-volume work covers major historical periods and relevant concepts, as well as discussions of various anti-immigration stances. Leading figures and groups in the anti-immigration movements of the past and present are also explored. Bringing together the work of distinguished scholars from many fields, including legal theorists, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists, the work covers aspects and issues related to anti-immigration sentiment from the establishment of the republic to contemporary times. For each time period, there is a focus on key groups, representing both actors and those acted upon. Political concerns of the time are also discussed to broaden understanding of motivation. In addition, entries explore the role of race, gender, and class in determining immigration policy and informing public sentiment.

Migration has become an increasingly important phenomenon for European societies. Patterns of migration flows can change greatly over time, with the size and composition of migrant populations reflecting both current and historical patterns of migration flows. Combined with the complexity and long-term nature of the migrant integration process, this can present challenges to policy-makers who need good quality information on which to base decisions. It is important that the statistics should go beyond the basic demographic characteristics of migrants and present a wider range of socio-economic information on migrants and their descendants. This publication looks at a broad range of characteristics of migrants living in the European Union and EFTA countries. It looks separately at the foreign-born, the foreign citizens, and the second generation. It addresses a variety of aspects of the socio-economic situation of migrants including labour market situation, income distribution, and poverty. The effects of different migration-related factors (i.e. reason of migration, length of residence) are examined. The situation of migrants is compared to that of the non-migrant reference population.