Abstract
Previous research on youth attitudes towards immigration has tended to focus on explaining why young people are more accepting of immigrants than their elders. In this article, therefore, we focus on the young people that are opposed to immigration. First, we use nationally representative survey data from young adults in England to highlight that a substantial minority hold negative attitudes towards immigrants. In the second half of the article, we then turn to qualitative data (in-depth interviews) to explore how young people talk about and justify holding these negative attitudes. Both the qualitative and the quantitative data suggest that anti-immigrant attitudes among young people are linked to the perception that immigrants pose an economic and cultural threat, and to the spread of culturalised forms of citizenship. What the qualitative data also reveal, however, is how these distinct discourses reinforce one another and how they intersect with other types of prejudice. We will argue that the idea of Hard Work is central to understanding anti-immigrant attitudes, as this has become a deeply-embedded cultural norm that is being used to include and exclude (immigrants and others), and to distinguish between who is deserving of membership of British society and who is not.
Highlights
In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, there has been a great deal of discussion about the fact that young Britons are more ‘cosmopolitan’ than the older generations, and that they are more likely to be accepting of immigrants and immigration
These same data reveal that there is a substantial minority that hold explicitly negative attitudes towards immigrants and believe that immigrants pose a threat to the economic and social order: 33% agreed that immigrants increase crime rates, and over 20% disagreed that immigrants improve the British economy or society
One finding from this analysis is that when young people express anti-immigrant attitudes, these attitudes are linked to the perception that immigrants are an economic and cultural threat and that they receive preferential treatment
Summary
In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, there has been a great deal of discussion about the fact that young Britons are more ‘cosmopolitan’ than the older generations, and that they are more likely to be accepting of immigrants and immigration (see Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Sloam & Henn, 2019). Economic competition has been the focus of much research, Hainmeuller and Hopkins (2014) argue that there is little evidence to support the economic threat thesis more broadly, including the theory that an individual’s attitudes towards immigrants is correlated with their personal economic circumstances Instead, they suggest that it is a threat to the cultural resources of the nation as a whole that drives anti-immigrant attitudes. The final sample from our web survey includes data from 1003 young adults in England aged 22–29, and is nationally representative in terms of gender, ethnicity, highest qualification and region Descriptive analysis of these data enabled us to identify how widespread negative attitudes towards immigrants were among young people, and to give us some preliminary indication as to the reasons why. The vast majority of these interviews were conducted face-to-face by academic members of our project team, who
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