Abstract
This paper article examines attitudes toward immigrants by analyzing data from the 2010 and 2016 waves of the EBRD’s Life in Transition Survey among respondents from 16 East European countries. Logistic regressions with clustered standard errors and country fixed effects show significantly higher anti-immigrant sentiments after the 2015 immigration pressures on the European Union borders compared with attitudes in 2010. Almost two thirds of the respondents agreed in 2016 that immigrants represented a burden on the state social services, even when the actual immigrant population in these countries was quite small. In addition, East Europeans expressed greater negative sentiments when the issue of immigration was framed as an economic problem—a burden on state social services—than as a cultural problem—having immigrants as neighbors. On the whole, these results point to the importance of contextualizing anti-immigrant attitudes and understanding the effect of external events and the framing of immigration-related survey questions.
Highlights
Across the world, recently elected leaders have garnered support from nationalist and populist movements, including in Russia (Grigoryan & Ponizovskiy, 2019), Hungary and Poland (Bandelj & Finley, 2019), the United States (Baker, Perry, & Whitehead, 2020), and Brazil (Schmidt & Quandt, 2018)
East Europeans expressed more anti-immigrant sentiments (AIS) when immigration was presented as an economic problem rather than as a cultural problem
The proportion of individuals across all countries who reported that they did not want immigrants as neighbors was 12.3% in 2010, increasing to 29.5% in 2016. Each country exhibited this increasing pattern except for Albania, Bosnia, and Montenegro. These three exceptional countries have significant ethnic populations that differ from the titular ethnicity, and each has a sizable Muslim population, which may contribute to lower average levels of anti-immigrant sentiments. (The data show the share of Muslims in Albania at 68%, in Bosnia 57%, and in Montenegro 15%.)
Summary
Recently elected leaders have garnered support from nationalist and populist movements, including in Russia (Grigoryan & Ponizovskiy, 2019), Hungary and Poland (Bandelj & Finley, 2019), the United States (Baker, Perry, & Whitehead, 2020), and Brazil (Schmidt & Quandt, 2018). This paper tackles these questions in the context of 16 East European countries that were a part of the former socialist bloc. This region is a key location to study anti-immigrant attitudes because the recent wave of nationalism in Europe can be traced to Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who rose to power in 2010 and who has adopted a strong anti-immigrant stance and has defied democratic principles of governance (Scheppele, 2014). The analyses reported in this paper employed logistic regression models with country-level fixed effects in 2010 and 2016, before and after the 2015 migration pressures, for two questions in the LITS that capture anti-immigrant sentiments (AIS): [1] agreement with the statement that one does not want to have immigrants as neighbors, and [2] agreement with the statement that immigrants are a burden on the national social protection system. These “everyday politics” include how individuals, politicians, perceive insiders and outsiders of the nation, especially immigrants
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