Seminář Moshe Semyonova: Attitudes toward Immigrants

The study focuses on over-time change in attitudes toward immigrants across European societies. For the purpose of the analysis we assembled data from four waves of the European Social Surveys (ESS) for 14 countries in four time-points between 2002 and 2014. The data analysis is conducted within the framework of hierarchical age-cohort-period model (HAPC) to estimate the dynamic relations between anti-immigrant sentiment and country’s social and economic conditions while taking into considerations variations across individuals and birth-cohorts. The data show considerable variations in anti-immigrant sentiment not only across individuals but also across countries, time and birth-cohorts. Further analysis lends support to expectations derived from the ‘competitive threat’ theoretical model. The findings show that anti-immigrant sentiment is more pronounced among socioeconomically vulnerable individuals and that it tends to rise over time with the country’s share of non-European ethnic minorities. Anti-immigrant sentiment was found to be more pronounced in the ‘old immigration countries’. The impact of economic conditions on anti-immigrant sentiment becomes evident through cohort’s effect.  In the ‘new immigration countries’, cohorts that entered the labor market when unemployment rate was high are more likely to hold negative attitudes toward immigrants. This finding suggests that declining economic conditions at the time of search for the first job produces long-lasting ‘scarring’ effect on attitudes. The findings underscore the central role played by cohorts and the importance of societal context for understanding temporal change in anti-immigrant sentiment.  

Moshe Semyonov - is a Chair Professor of the Sociology of Labor at Tel Aviv University where he teaches in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Labor Studies. He is also Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests lie in the areas of comparative social stratification and inequality, structural sources of inequality, labor markets, global migration, and Israeli society.