Exclusion of Legal Migrants in Western Europe

Abstract

Most European governments have put the migration issue high on the political agenda. These migrants also feature high on the public agenda. The fact that people wish to deny civil rights to legal migrants already living in a host country seems more serious than any other aspect of ethnic exclusionism, because the mere social presence of ethnic groups is marginalized if one denies civil rights to these minorities. Ethnic competition theorists are likely to claim that the effects of both individual and contextual characteristics on ethnic exclusionism operate through perceptions of ethnic threat. The hypotheses are that ethnic exclusionism will be affected by the perception of collective ethnic threat and by the perception of personal threat, deteriorating personal conditions. The parameter estimates with their standard errors show that the perception of ethnic threat is the most important predictor, whereas the effects of perceptions of personal threat are less strong.