Public opinion on immigration : is it converging globally or regionally?

Abstract

In this chapter, we consider global patterns and trends in public opinion on immigration. This includes a focus on attitudes to immigration and related concepts like beliefs, prejudices or preferences (Delli Carpini 2011, 289) that are at times used interchangeably. Attitudes are typically understood as “evaluations about social and political issues”(Funk 2011, 422). Druckman and Lupia (2000, 4) suggest that they represent “people’s orientations toward objects”, whereas preferences can be defined as “rankings derived from comparative evaluations”, ie attitudes. In other words, attitudes encapsulate individuals’ underlying evaluations of political objects, whereas preferences are the product of rankings that individuals make based on these attitudes. Moreover, according to the authors, attitudes and preferences are based on beliefs about the attributes of the corresponding object, which are in turn the result of the person’s interactions with the surrounding environment. Another relevant concept we focus on in this chapter is that of prejudice. Prejudice, and for our purposes anti-immigrant prejudice, can be conceived as negative affect, or antipathy, coupled with incorrect generalisations (Quillian 1995). Blinder et al.(2019, 1237) refer to prejudice as “a negative attitude toward an out-group or perhaps a set of pejorative beliefs about out-group members”, which can occur in an implicit and/or explicit form. Finally, we also focus on issue priorities or “salience”, that is the extent to which immigration is considered important.