Anti-immigration attitudes and the opposition to European integration: A critical assessment

Abstract

The aim of this overview is to critically examine the state of research on the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and attitudes toward European integration. We argue that the two most commonly used measures of anti-immigrant attitudes do not fully capture perceived threats from immigrants and opinion about different immigrant groups. Future research should pay more attention to two particular issues: first, scholars could employ methodological techniques that capture the underlying constructs associated with attitudes and public opinion; second, researchers could differentiate between groups within the overall immigrant population. This overview identifies themes in the literature while drawing attention to the need for more research on the behavioral underpinnings of anti-immigrant attitudes and public opinion on European integration.

Keywords

European integration immigration measurement validity public opinion survey research

Introduction

Western European countries have been a popular destination for large-scale immigration and refugee flows from the rest of the world, particularly since the Second World War. Between 1945 and 1970, immigrants and their family members came to Western Europe mostly to join the labor force from neighboring countries, such as Turkey, and postcolonial countries, such as Morocco and Algeria, or to seek asylum from Eastern Europe. After the global economic crisis of the 1970s, Western European countries tightened their immigration policies to mostly allow migration for family reunification purposes. However, since the 1990s, due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the conflicts in the Middle East and the trend toward globalization, the volume of immigration into the EU has increased once again (Geddes, 2003; Messina, 2007).

Eurostat data indicate that 12% of the EU-27’s current total population aged between 24 and 54 are first-generation immigrants. Another 5% are second-generation immigrants with at least one parent who is not an EU member state citizen (Eurostat, 2011). Combined with their diverse social, cultural, and economic backgrounds, the existence of large numbers of immigrants in Europe has raised various research questions that need to be answered to establish a path to effective citizenship and to implement immigration policies to allow peaceful coexistence of immigrants and other EU citizens.

This article reviews the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes and European public opinion and identifies four main research themes. The first theme focuses on how the perceived cultural and identity threats of immigrants affect people’s attitudes toward the EU (e.g. De Vreese and Boomgaarden, 2005; Lubbers, 2008; Luedtke, 2005). The primary question has been whether those who are afraid of the increased cultural diversity due to immigration flows oppose European integration since it involves removal of borders and free movement of people. The second theme examines attitudes toward Muslim immigrants in particular since predominantly Muslim countries, including Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey, are among the top 15 immigrant sending countries to the EU (Eurostat, 2011). In 2010, 44 million Muslims lived in the EU, and this number is expected to increase with further immigration and the possible accession of Turkey, Albania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Events like the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Charlie Hebdo shooting, anti-Islam, and anti-immigration demonstrations of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) across Europe, the Northern League anti-immigration protests in Italy and the Syrian refugee crisis have also turned the Muslim population in Europe into a focal point of discussions. In this context, studies on EU public opinion have mostly investigated public’s perceptions and willingness to accept predominantly Muslim countries as EU members, and how attitudes toward Muslim immigrants affect support for European integration (e.g. De Vreese et al., 2008; Hobolt et al., 2011; McLaren, 2007). The third theme is concerned with how perceived economic and security threats posed by immigrants affect EU opinion. The fourth theme addresses how immigrants view the EU (Dowley and Silver, 2011; Roeder, 2011).

From our review of the literature, we claim that the main challenge facing scholars is to develop relevant measures of anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe. For instance, one of the widely used measures of anti-immigrant attitudes, so called item indices, is far from perfect. Existing indices are constructed from survey questions reflecting respondents’ assessments of how immigration would influence their personal as well as national economy, security, and way of life. These indices do not allow for the identification of the explanatory importance of the different components of prejudice toward the immigrants. We, therefore, propose that there is a need to address how a diverse set of perceived economic, cultural, security, and religious threats from immigrants independently affects public opposition to the process of European integration, EU membership, or EU policy.

A separate strand of research has measured anti-immigrant attitudes using the percentage of immigrants in member-states based on the assumption that the larger the number of immigrants, the greater anti-immigrant attitudes will be. However, the number of immigrants might not capture the multidimensional complexities of the perceived threats and the quality and/or quantity of the local population’s contact with immigrants.

As shown by earlier literature, we expect attitudes toward immigrants to be a key explanatory factor in analyses of support for European integration. However, drawing on insights from the general literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, we also propose that there is a need to redesign existing survey questions to identify the specific cultural and economic threats posed by immigrants and the nature of public interaction with them. Developing new measures of anti-immigrant attitudes will improve our ability to account for public opposition to European integration in at least three ways.

First, although existing studies treat immigrants from the same country as a homogenous group in terms of ethnicity and religion, they may actually speak different languages and have different cultural and religious practices. Hence, they might not attract the same level of opposition from EU citizens. For example, in Turkey’s case, all studies that we covered for this overview refer to immigrants from Turkey as Turks without distinguishing between Turks, Kurds, and Alevis, who are viewed differently by the European public (Koopmans, 2015; Kosnick, 2004; Özyürek, 2009). In short, if European citizens’ views of non-member states depend on ‘the people who constitute the country’ (McLaren, 2007: 257) then we need to develop accurate measures of who those people really are.

Second, existing studies assume that all immigrants in Europe are perceived as ‘outsiders’ who differ from the dominant culture of the host society, and whose social identities are sources of fear for EU citizens. However, immigrant groups vary in terms of the amount of time they have spent in the EU and their degree of integration into the European community. Research on the formation of anti-immigrant attitudes has demonstrated that frequent and long-term interactions with immigrants and their citizenship status are likely to decrease bias against them (Pettigrew, 1998; Schneider, 2008). Thus, an analysis is necessary to understand whether the perceived threats of immigrants depend on their level of integration into society and how this affects support for the European integration.

Third, we postulate that there remains a lack of evidence on how attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees affect public opinion toward candidate countries like Turkey and toward Europe’s response to Syrian crisis. There has been no study directly measuring attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees in the EU context. Theoretically, however, it might be possible that different dynamics are at play in the formation of attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees than toward legal immigrants to the EU. On the one hand, asylum seekers might be viewed as undeserving since they did not come to Europe as a result of the labor policies or labor force demand of host countries (Sales, 2002). Economic refugees might provoke even greater opposition than political refugees since the latter are viewed as genuine and less of an economic threat (Louis et al., 2007). On the other hand, attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees have a humanitarian aspect due to the life-threatening difficulties that refugees face in their journeys to Europe. It is, thus, plausible that humanitarian concerns regarding the dangerous journeys of asylum seekers may decrease out-group bias and increase sympathy. Developing measures of attitudes toward those groups will help us to understand both public support for shared EU asylum policies and to disentangle the differences in understanding national priorities.

This article, in turn, provides an overview of the literature on the impact of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes. Then it critically evaluates how anti-immigrant attitudes are understood and measured in the literature. The discussion provides new perspectives on how alternative measurement designs could lead to the development of a fuller understanding of anti-immigrant attitudes and opposition to European integration.

The state of the existing research on immigration and EU public opinion

There is a growing literature on the relationship between immigration attitudes and support for European integration. To identify existing theoretical and empirical advances in the field, we compiled a list of articles published from 1966 to 2015 using the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).¹ We searched the SSCI database using different combinations of the following keywords: European Union, European integration, immigra*, migration, public attitudes, public opinion, and public behavior.² English articles in social sciences were selected for inclusion in the review, which resulted in a list of 90 articles. From this list, we eliminated presidential addresses, conference proceedings, review articles, and editorials, along with studies that either did not focus on the analysis of diffuse and specific support for European integration or did not include an independent variable for immigrants or immigration attitudes.³ Table 1 presents an overview of the selected 25 articles.

Table 1.

Summary of the selected articles.

Authors	Source	Themes of research	Dependent variable(s)	Immigration variable(s)	Data	Sample	Method
McLaren (2002)	Journal of Politics	IT	Support for the EU	Realistic and symbolic threats from minorities	EB 47.1	EU-15	OLS
Nelsen and Guth (2003)	Journal of Common Market Studies	IT	Support for the EU	(1) Anti-immigrant attitudes. (2) Ethnocentrism.	EB 47.2	EU-15	Bivariate correlations and OLS
De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005)	European Union Politics	IT	(1) Support for the EU. (2) Voting intention in a referendum on the enlargement of the European Union.	Index of anti-immigrant attitudes	Original survey, 2002	Denmark and the Netherlands	OLS and logistic regression
Luedtke (2005)	European Union Politics	IT, GR	Support for the harmonization of EU immigration policy.	(1) Perceived number of immigrants. (2) Opinion about immigrants’ social rights in the EU	EB 53.0	EU-15	Logistic regression
De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2006)	Journal of Common Market Studies	IT, GR	Support for the enlargement of the EU	Index of anti-immigrant attitudes	(1) Content analysis of news media. (2) Two-wave panel surveys, 2002	Denmark	OLS
Lubbers and Scheepers (2007)	European Societies	IT	Political Euro-scepticism	(1) Attitudes toward European immigrants. (2) Index of general anti-immigrant attitudes	European Social Survey, 2004	EU-15 + six countries	OLS multi-level regression
McLaren (2007)	European Union Politics	IT, GR	Attitudes toward the membership of Turkey and other pre-2004 candidates in the EU	(1) Threats to group resources. (2) Threats to culture. (3) Percentage of immigrants from Turkey. (4) Threats to group resources * Percentage of immigrants from Turkey. (5) Threats to culture * Percentage of immigrants from Turkey.	EB 53.0	EU-15	Multi-level multinomial logistic regression
De Vreese et al. (2008)	European Union Politics	IT, GR	Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	Index of anti-immigrant attitudes	Original survey, 2004	The Netherlands	OLS and structural equation modeling.
Lubbers (2008)	European Union Politics	IT, RT, GR	Voting behavior in the EU referendum on the European Constitution	(1) Perceived economic and ethnic threats from minorities. (2) Attitude toward Muslims.	Social and Cultural Trends, 2005/2006	The Netherlands	Logistic regression
Boomgaarden and Freire (2009)	West European Politics	IT, RT	Support for the EU	Index of anti-immigrant attitudes	European Social Survey, 2006/2007 and 2008	EU-15 + seven countries	OLS and structural equation modeling
Hobolt et al. (2011)	European Union Politics	IT, GR	(1) Support for the EU. (2) Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	Index of anti-immigrant attitudes	Original survey, 2008	Ireland and the Netherlands	OLS
Azrout et al. (2011)	European Union Politics	IT, GR	Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	(1) Framing in terms of out-group. (2) Index of anti-immigrant attitudes.	Original survey, 2008	The Netherlands	OLS
Canan-Sokullu (2011)	South European Society and Politics	IT, GR	Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	Anti-immigrant attitudes	Transatlantic Trends Surveys and European Elite Surveys, 2006, 2007 and 2008	11 EU member states	Ordinal logistic regression
Dowley and Silver (2011)	International Journal of Public Opinion Research	IA	Support for the EU	Minority group status	European Social Survey 2006/2007	21 EU member states	OLS multi-level regression
Lubbers and Jaspers (2011)	European Union Politics	IT	Support for the EU	Perceived ethnic threat from minorities	Original panel survey, 1990–2008	The Netherlands	Structural equation modeling
Roeder (2011)	Political Studies	IA	Support for the EU	(1) Citizenship status. (2) Origin of immigrants. (3) Origin * citizenship status. (4) Immigrant * income. (5) Immigrant * education. (6) Immigrant *occupation.	European Social Survey 2003/2006	EU-15	OLS multi-level regression
Azrout et al. (2012)	Journal of Common Market Studies	IT, GR	Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	Anti-immigrant attitudes	(1) Content analysis of news media. (2) Two-wave panel surveys, 2009.	The EU-15 and six countries	OLS multi-level regression
Balestrini (2012)	Comparative European Politics	GR	Support for the EU	The EU’s role in immigration	EB 60.1, 62.0, 63.4, 65.2, 68.1	Italy, France and Great Britain	Logistic regression
Kuhn (2012)	European Union Politics	GR	Support for the EU	Anti-immigrant attitudes	EB 65.1	Germany and France	Multi-level ordinal logit regression
Azrout et al. (2013a)	Acta Politica	IT, RT	Attitudes toward the membership of Turkey, Croatia and Switzerland in the EU	(1) Perceived religious threats from immigrants. (2) Considering Turkey’s EU membership a threat posed by increased immigration.	Original two-way panel survey, 2008	The Netherlands	OLS
Azrout et al. (2013b)	International Journal of Public Opinion Research	IT, GR, RT	Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	(1) Index of anti-immigrant attitudes. (2) Number of Turkish migrants. (3) Number of Muslims. (4) Importance of the immigration issue.	Original survey data, 2009	20 EU member states	OLS multi-level regression
van Klingeren et al. (2013)	Journal of European integration	IT	Support for the EU	Increase in immigration compared to the previous year	EB 42 and 64.2	EU-12	OLS multi-level regression
Tillman (2013)	European Union Politics	IT	Support for the EU	Index of anti-immigrant attitudes	European Values Survey, 2008	EU-27	OLS multi-level regression, structural equation modeling
Yavcan (2013)	Turkish studies	IT	(1) Support for the enlargement of the EU. (2) Support for the EU.	(1) Anti-immigrant attitudes. (2) Turkish prime. (3) Italian prime. (4) Polish prime. (5) Anti-immigration * Turkish prime. (6) Anti-immigration * Italian prime. (7) Anti-immigration * Polish prime.	Original survey data, 2009	Germany	Bivariate correlations and OLS
Erisen and Erisen (2014)	Journal of Common Market Studies	IT, GR	Attitude toward Turkish EU membership	Anti-immigrant attitudes	EB 66.1	EU-25	OLS multi-level regression

IT: identity threat; RT: religious threat; GR: group threat; IA: immigrant attitudes.

Table 1 reveals that scholarly interest in how anti-immigrant attitudes relate to EU attitudes has grown over the last decade. Four main research themes emerge from the literature which are also relevant to the articles in this special issue. First, there is a substantial interest how feelings of in-group favoritism and identity threats from immigrants affect people’s views of the EU. Second, a number of studies examines whether religious intolerance toward immigrants accounts for variance in attitudes toward the EU. Third, scholars focus on the explanatory power of economic threats from immigrants. Fourth, a small number of studies explores immigrant opinion about the EU.

Perceived threat and attitudes on immigration

McLaren (2002) is one of the first to study the relationship between hostility toward others and public opinion on European integration. While the study does not provide a theoretical discussion or a direct analysis of how anti-immigrant sentiments affect European attitudes, it does provide a starting point for understanding how the perceived threats of the in-group promote Euroscepticism. McLaren (2002) starts with the argument that public attitudes toward the EU are shaped by each person’s desire to protect their in-group, the respondent’s nationality. She argues that there are two major threats to the in-group from outsiders who have gained access to the country with the abolition of borders as a result of European integration: threats to group resources (realistic threat) and threats to group culture (symbolic threat). The study measured these threats using survey questions asking respondents whether they think minorities abuse social benefit system and whether they think minorities’ religious practices threaten the respondent’s way of life. McLaren (2002) acknowledges that these questions do not capture fear of threat from other EU citizens but from all minority groups in general. She also acknowledges that when respondents were asked to think about minorities, they probably thought about immigrants (non-Europeans), who constitute a sizeable portion of the EU’s ethnic and religious minorities. Thus, although it was not the explicit theoretical intention of the article, the statistical analysis revealed the effects of perceived threats from immigrants on what the EU citizens generally think about the process of European integration.

Following McLaren (2002), 20 other studies reviewed here have adopted the idea that perceived identity threats from immigrants affect support for European integration. Building on McLaren (2002), De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005) provide one of the first theoretical discussions of the link between immigration attitudes and support for the EU. De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005: 65) point out that McLaren (2002) uses immigration attitudes to measure perceived threats to the nation, but her study ignores that while ‘personality traits and personal values, as well as perceptions of group competition or a general sense of insecurity’ are the main determinants of immigration attitudes, they are not significantly important to be perceived threats to the nation. That is, anti-immigration attitudes are not a proxy for threats to national identity so there is a need to clarify the relevance of anti-immigrant feelings for the degree of support toward European integration. De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005) posit that those who view immigrants as the out-group also have a tendency to view all other people of different nationality, ethnicity, or religion as members of the out-group. This implies that Europeans who are negatively biased against immigrants are also likely to express hostility toward other out-groups. Since the EU removes borders and brings people together, De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005) conclude that these people will also oppose European integration.

Among studies highlighting the identity aspects of anti-immigrant opinion, Azrout et al. (2011) also assume that people who view immigrants as others have a tendency to categorize everyone outside their group as others and to show a negative bias toward them. Similarly, for Nelsen and Guth (2003), anti-immigrant attitudes are related to intolerance of social diversity and hence to the European integration project. Yet, it could be the case that not all immigrants evoke negative feelings for others or for European integration. For example, when EU citizens think about Turkish immigrants, their immigration attitudes have a stronger impact on attitudes about EU enlargement than when they think about Polish or Italian immigrants (Yavcan, 2013). Tillman (2013) argues that authoritarianism is a predisposition that promotes prejudice and hostility toward others, especially when there is a threat to social cohesion. Since immigration represents an important perceived challenge to national unity, the study expects authoritarian individuals to be more likely to oppose immigration, removal of borders, social diversity and hence the EU. McLaren (2007) also contributed to this discussion by claiming that the impact of immigration attitudes on European opinion would be stronger in member-states with larger immigrant populations. The more immigrants there are in an EU host country, the more opportunities its citizens would have to observe the immigrants’ cultural differences. Thus, where the number of immigrants is high, so is opposition to enlargement.

Religion and attitudes on immigration

Four other papers reviewed here consider the link between religious beliefs and antipathy toward immigrants. Among them, Boomgaarden and Freire (2009) found that some denominations, including Pre-Vatican II Catholics, post-Vatican Catholics, sectarian Protestants, and mainstream Protestants are more negative toward immigrants and to European integration than non-church members because of their exclusionist values and hierarchical traditions that hamper trust in others. For Azrout et al. (2013a), the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent terrorist bombings in Madrid and London increased religion’s impact on attitudes toward immigrants. Muslims have been increasingly stereotyped as backward and violent; hence, the perceived religious threat posed by Muslim immigrants has reduced support for predominantly Muslim Turkey’s EU membership. Lubbers and Coenders (2017) also state that ‘the anti-Islamic rhetoric of many radical right parties in particular and negative public climate towards Muslims’ increases national identification’s effect on the likelihood to vote for radical right parties. Along similar lines, Azrout et al. (2013b) found that as the number of Muslim immigrants increases in a country, anti-immigrant attitudes have a stronger effect on support for Turkey’s membership because group categorizations become more salient as contact with immigrants increases. In their contribution to this issue, Azrout and Wojcieszak (2017) extend this argument and demonstrate that group-specific attitudes predict opinion regarding group-related EU policies. While attitudes toward Muslims explain support for Turkey’s membership, negativity toward Polish immigrants predicts opposition for EU strengthening. Erisen and Kentmen-Çin (2017), in this special issue, also found that religion of immigrants manipulate the type of threats and risks associated with immigrants. The Muslim cue increases political and social intolerance in Germany, whereas it decreases both types of intolerance in the Netherlands compared to a generic immigrant cue.

Group resources and attitudes on immigration

Thirteen of the articles reviewed here claim that anti-immigrant attitudes are also triggered by perceived threats to group resources. The basic argument is that the removal of borders between EU member states leads to more immigration, which increases perceived economic threat to EU citizens, thereby making them more opposed to European integration (Canan-Sokullu, 2011; Lubbers, 2008; van Klingeren et al., 2013). For McLaren (2002), De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005), Kuhn (2012), Lubbers and Jaspers (2011), and Erisen and Erisen (2014), it is the perceived increase in job market competition or, more generally, competition for scarce resources that triggers anti-immigrant attitudes. According to van Klingeren et al. (2013: 695), open borders and an inflow of cheaper immigrants particularly upset those EU citizens who are financially insecure or have a lower occupational status. In their contribution to this issue, Steenbergen and Siczek suggest that immigrant attitudes are also related to the personality trait of risk propensity. They found that individuals’ inclination to take risks is positively associated with their evaluation of the effects of immigration. This is because risk-taking people are more likely to frame immigration into their country as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Immigrant attitudes toward the EU

There are two articles with a different theoretical focus. Unlike other studies that focus on the impact of anti-immigrant attitudes, Dowley and Silver (2011) and Roeder (2011) examine how being an immigrant affects attitudes toward the EU. Dowley and Silver (2011: 317) claim that minority groups in Europe support the EU because they view it ‘as an ally if not a thoroughly effective one, in addressing those with concerns about protecting minority language, culture, and autonomy from national-level neglect, hostility, or centralizing tendencies’. Roeder (2011) adds that the immigrants’ calculations about the gains and costs of free movement and their weak identification with their home country increase their support for European unification. He also suggests that holding citizenship decreases support because it strengthens feelings of belonging to the host society. In this issue, Erisen (2017) also focuses on immigrants’ need to resort European identification. She suggests that individual experiences of economic and social discrimination and of the intensity of anti-discrimination policies at the state level shape non-EU immigrants’ identification with the EU.

Taken together, the literature provides insights about the extent to which negative opinions about immigrant decrease support for the EU. Given that current research efforts do not indicate how different aspects of immigrant groups are related to citizens’ opinions about the EU, there is a need for further research on how economic, social, and political differences between immigrant groups sustain anti-immigrant attitudes and attitudes toward the process of European integration.

Toward more valid and reliable measurement of anti-immigrant attitudes

Concerns on using indices measuring anti-immigrant sentiments

In this introduction, we point out that the two most frequently used ways to measure anti-immigrant attitudes are either not differentiating between perceived threats from immigrants or between different immigrant groups. One of these methods is to build indices from survey data on individuals’ views about immigrants. The existing research suggests that anti-immigrant sentiments are a product of perceived economic, cultural, and religious threats posed by immigrants; thus it makes sense to combine different dimensions of antipathy toward immigrants in an index. This is exemplified in the work undertaken by De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005), whose study claims that anti-immigrant attitudes are multidimensional, resulting from perceived threats to personal values, group resources, security and national identity. Based on this argument, they created an index from individuals’ perceptions of the following items: (1) immigration is good for the labor market; (2) immigrants cause problems in the schools that their children attend; (3) immigrants enrich Danish or Dutch culture; (4) members of immigrant groups misuse Danish or Dutch social welfare; and (5) their religion is a threat to our way of life. A series of similar survey items were also used by earlier research to create similar indices (e.g. Azrout et al., 2011, 2012, 2013b; Boomgaarden and Freire, 2009; De Vreese et al., 2008; De Vreese and Boomgaarden, 2006; Hobolt et al., 2011; Lubbers and Scheepers, 2007; Nelsen and Guth 2003). However, there are reasons to be cautious when interpreting the results of these studies.

First, these indices measure the cumulative effects of perceived realistic and symbolic threats posed by the immigrants without measuring how these threats independently affect attitudes toward the EU. The general literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, however, suggests that economic, security, cultural, and religious threats may trigger anti-immigrant attitudes independently of each other (Chandler and Tsai, 2001; Citrin et al., 1997; Espenshade and Calhoun, 1993; Sniderman et al., 2004; Stephan et al., 1999) since they have a different ‘nature, intensity, causes, and even consequences’ (Canetti-Nisim et al., 2008: 98). As a result, these threat types display different sensitivities to individual respondents’ ideologies, socio-demographic characteristics, physical proximity to immigrant groups and type of relationship with immigrants (Ceobanu, 2011).

While economic threats jeopardize the welfare of the host country citizens, symbolic threats challenge the in-group’s way of life, and security threats are direct physical threats to human life. The observed effects of economic and symbolic threats are also more likely to operate in the long-term whereas security threats are usually viewed as ‘urgent and immediate’ (Canetti-Nisim et al., 2008: 99; Newman et al., 2012; Strabac et al., 2014; Van der Noll et al., 2010). Thus, the specification of different sources of negative evaluations toward immigrants, rather than combining all these sources in an index, will help us understand whether the EU citizens hold the Union responsible more for the material, symbolic, or security threats posed by immigrants. This approach would also help in formulating public policies aimed at decreasing anti-immigration hostility in the EU, in addition to ensuring harmonious and peaceful relations among EU communities with further integration.

Second, we suggest that current indices of anti-immigrant attitudes do not entirely capture perceived economic, cultural, and security threats. With regard to economic threats, the survey questions used to create the indices ask respondents for their general opinion about whether immigration is good or bad for the labor market/national economy. None of the studies reviewed here use survey questions that distinguish between individuals’ opinions about the effects of skilled and unskilled labor (à la Brader et al., 2008 on the U.S. case). Yet the labor market competition model rests on the assumption that ‘natives should oppose immigrants with skill levels similar to their own but support immigrants with different skill levels’ (Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010: 62). Previous studies on the impact of immigration on the labor market in Europe have also demonstrated that native workers are more likely to suffer from job losses and wage reduction when immigrants with human capital endowments similar to their own enter their country (Dustmann et al., 2005; Gang and Rivera-Batiz, 1994). Therefore, there is a need to create measures that distinguish between the perceived threats from skilled and unskilled immigrants.

To capture cultural threat, De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2005, 2006), Lubbers and Scheepers (2007), Boomgaarden and Freire (2009), Hobolt et al. (2011), Azrout et al. (2012), and Azrout et al. (2013a, 2013b) relied on general questions asking respondents whether immigrants or their religion pose a cultural threat or not. One exception is Azrout et al. (2011), who used a set of question asking whether the religious practices of immigrants are a threat, whether children of immigrants decrease the quality of education and whether immigrants enrich the country’s cultural life. Overall, however, these measures fail to distinguish specific aspects of those cultural threats. As a result, for example, we do not know how exactly Turkish immigrants threaten the way of life in Europe. We do not know which Turkish cultural values, such as gender roles, family honor, respect for authority, or child-rearing practices, play a more important role in shaping attitudes toward Turkish immigrants and Turkey. Since Turkey is the least supported candidate country, examining which specific cultural threats Turkish immigrants apparently pose might help to design policies that increase public support for Turkey’s possible membership. Equally, behavioral approaches that combine these domains or test the associations among these factors could offer a broader perspective to the issue (Erisen and Erisen, 2014).

In the case of security threats, the survey questions used in the literature reviewed here, do not specify whether they are referring to threats to public health, security forces or civilian safety and life. The questions simply ask whether immigrants are a threat to security (see Azrout et al., 2011; De Vreese et al., 2008, Hobolt et al., 2011). However, given that different types of crimes and threats, such as homicides, vandalism, illegal street protests, petty crimes, and terrorism, will create different levels of tension in the host community, the literature could benefit from identifying which type of security concerns individuals associate immigrant groups with. This is because the general literature on anti-immigrant attitudes shows that terrorism related security threats, which result in both ‘personal and collective fear’, and posttraumatic stress disorder, are more likely to lead to exclusionist political attitudes like supporting border closures and stricter criteria for granting asylum or citizenship (Canetti-Nisim et al., 2009: 364). Therefore, it is possible to argue that different types of security threats will have different impacts on support for European integration.

Concerns on using the population of the immigrant group

The second common method of measuring anti-immigrant attitudes is using the size of immigrant groups in the host country, as in McLaren (2007), Azrout et al. (2013b), and van Klingeren et al. (2013), who use the number of immigrants in a country to capture the frequency of contact with immigrants. The underlying argument here is the more intergroup contact EU citizens have, the more they feel threatened by immigrants and, in turn, the more they oppose European integration. However, the findings from these studies are mixed. McLaren (2007) finds that the percentage of Turkish immigrants in the EU15 is positively correlated with opposition to Turkey’s EU membership. Moreover, she shows that greater Turkish immigration increases the impact of perceived material and symbolic threats on the likelihood of opposing Turkey’s accession. Azrout et al. (2013b) correlate the number of Turkish migrants and the number of Muslims in EU member states to measures of negative evaluations toward immigrants. They find that the number of Turks and Muslims in a country significantly reduces support for Turkey’s membership. V an Klingeren et al. (2013), however, show that an increase in the number of immigrants relative to the previous year made it less likely for Euroscepticism to increase.

We raise five concerns regarding the use of immigrant groups’ size as a proxy for the anti-immigrant attitudes. First, one possible explanation for the mixed results is that measuring the aggregate number of immigrants in EU member-states or changes in their percentages may not fully capture the quality and quantity of contact with immigrants. The literature on determinants of anti-immigrant attitudes shows that, no matter how large the other group is, individuals prefer to engage in regular interactions with in-group members and avoid repeated and intense contact with the out-group. The percentage of immigrants is positively correlated with casual contact but such encounters ‘will not provide relevant new information about how others are different from oneself, […] do not encourage increased familiarity, […] and are unlikely to reduce prejudices’ (Freitag and Rapp, 2013: 426). Thus, not only the quantity, but also the quality of interaction is important in the formation of attitudes toward immigrants. Scholars have identified that certain social settings, such as workplaces and schools, compel individuals to have intense, frequent and longer interactions with immigrants. They find that such interactions are more likely to decrease hostility and prejudice against immigrants than casual contacts (Pagotto et al., 2010; Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2000). Therefore, further research is needed to explore specific effects exerted by the frequency and the density of social interactions with immigrants on opposition to European integration.

One might argue that it is not only an actual contact with out-group members that evokes an in-group anxiety, but also a mere possibility of such contact. Since the possibility of meeting immigrants increases with the share of immigrants in the population, the latter may, nevertheless, capture individuals’ attitudes toward immigrants. However, caution must be applied when interpreting the results of McLaren (2007), Azrout et al. (2013b), and van Klingeren et al. (2013). None of these studies controls for the effects of contextual factors, such as residential segregation (Hood and Morris, 1997; Semyonov and Glikman, 2009; Taylor, 1998) or living in urban or rural settings (Schneider, 2008), which have been previously found to affect the possibility of meeting with immigrants. Hence, future studies should identify how the number of immigrants in a particular country interacts with these social factors.

Second, most individuals lack knowledge of the exact number of immigrants. Studies from Europe show that people are likely to overestimate the numbers in their country because of the intense political and media attention directed to the issue (Semyonov et al., 2004; Sides and Citrin, 2007). Therefore, even if the percentage of immigrants and the possibility of meeting with them are actually low, individuals might still fear interacting with them. As van Klingeren et al. (2013) notes, EU citizens may also not notice changes in immigrant populations, especially if they are small and gradual. Therefore, we suggest that an alternative solution would be to use a perceived number of immigrants to tap anti-immigrant attitudes. This approach has been applied by Luedtke (2005). After controlling for various individual level socio-economic and demographic factors, he finds that individuals who believe that there are too many minorities in their country, rather than not many, are more likely to oppose EU control over immigration policy. However, we should also be cautious in interpreting these results since Luedtke (2005) did not control for social and political factors generally associated with over-perception of immigrant populations, such as media use, ethnic closeness, interest in politics and cognitive skills (Hjerm, 2007; Schlueter and Scheepers, 2010).

Third, regarding the number of immigrants, we also suggest that the numbers of culturally and/or economically distinct immigrant groups in a host country might matter for anti-immigrant attitudes. Studies find that members of a host society place culturally and/or economically distinct immigrant groups at the bottom of the social hierarchy, viewing them as ‘devalued immigrants’ (Ford, 2011; Green et al., 2010: 180; Hjerm and Nagayoshi, 2011; Schneider 2008). Thus, it is possible that rather than the overall number of immigrants, it is the number of devalued immigrants that fuels the opposition to European integration. Similarly, opposition might not be due to growth in the overall number of immigrants, but growth in the number of devalued immigrants. For example, in the Turkish case, it may not be simply the size of the population of Turkish immigrants that influence attitudes toward the EU, but specifically the number of culturally and religiously distant and/or economically weaker Turkish immigrants, such as those who ‘wear visible signs of cultural or religious affiliation such as headscarves or other attire’, who are ‘visible in terms of skin color or ethnic features differing from national majority’, or who are unskilled and unemployed (Green et al., 2010: 179; Hjerm and Nagayoshi, 2011). Therefore, the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes and support for the EU would benefit from creating measures that capture the size of culturally, religiously, and economically distinct immigrant groups.

This discussion brings us to our fourth concern about measuring anti-immigrant sentiment through the number of immigrants. Studies that use the number of immigrants measure the total number of non-EU citizens from immigrant sending countries. They do not distinguish between attitudes toward different ethnic and religious groups coming from the same country. Indices for anti-immigrant attitudes also treat immigrants as a homogenous group and reflect native individuals’ views on how these groups threaten their resources, values, symbols, and/or security. However, immigrants from Turkey, for example, include Kurds, Alevis, Laz, and Arabs, who have different native languages, and cultural and religious practices. Therefore, their realistic and symbolic threats to the host citizens might be different as well. This can be seen in the case of Alevi, Kurdish, and Turkish immigrants living in Europe. Alevism is a sect of Shia Islam that differs from Sunni Islam mostly with regard to its interpretation of gender relations, secularism, and religious practices. Studies on ethnic minorities in Europe show that native citizens tend to interpret Alevi values ‘as progressive and tolerant’ and view Alevi immigrants from Turkey as ‘less alien’ and more integrated into Europe than Sunni Turks (Koopmans, 2015; Kosnick, 2004; Özyürek, 2009). Kurdish immigrants, on the other hand, are mostly perceived as nonconforming because of their frequent public protests against the ethnic oppression of Kurds in Turkey or for their protests in support of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Their annual spring celebration, Newroz, for example, usually turns into violent confrontations with nationalist Turkish immigrants. Consequently, ‘neighborhood residents sometimes feel overwhelmed, and local […] politicians complain about them taking over the neighborhood’s streets’ both in Germany and Belgium (Ehrkamp and Leitner, 2003: 142; Koutoubas et al., 2009). As a result, we infer that the different characteristics of immigrant groups from the same country may lead to different threat perceptions. Therefore, treating immigrant groups from the same country as homogenous may lead to inaccurate interpretations of the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and opposition to European integration.⁴

Fifth, Muslim immigrants from different countries, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Turkey, also do not form a homogenous group due to theological, historical, linguistic, ethnic, and institutional differences (Öktem, 2011). EU citizens may perceive Muslim immigrants from EU member states such as Bulgaria and Greece as having a stronger European identity than those from non-EU countries such as Turkey and Albania. Measuring negative evaluations of Muslim immigrants in terms of the total number of Muslims in the EU member states or attitudes toward Muslims as a whole may not capture the perception of differences between them. Therefore, we suggest that research on Muslim immigrants and attitudes toward the EU would be more persuasive if it explored cultural, institutional and ethnic differences among Muslim immigrants and different forms of Islam.

Finally, we also want to bring attention to a lack of scholarly interest in the impact of the number of asylum seekers and refugees on support for European integration. This academic disinterest is surprising since it is widely reported that the EU is experiencing the biggest refugee crisis since the World War II, mostly due to the ongoing war in Syria (Stone, 2015). Eurostat data show that a total of 122,065 Syrians applied for asylum to EU member states in 2014, a 144% increase compared to 2013. The number of asylum seekers from poverty and conflict ridden countries like Afghanistan, Kosovo, Eritrea, Iraq, and Gambia also doubled in 2014. In total, 635,920 people from non-EU countries sought asylum in the EU in 2014 (Eurostat, 2015). United Nations reports that the number increased to 774,000 in 2015 (Thompson, 2015). In light of the growing numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, it is becoming important to develop valid and reliable measures of attitudes toward people fleeing from non-EU conflict zones, and to study how these attitudes are related to European integration. The measurement of attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees are also very much related to attitudes toward Turkey’s EU membership since Turkey has been the host to the most Syrian refugees since the conflict began (İçduygu, 2015). It is, therefore, possible that EU citizens’ support for Turkey’s accession will be shaped not only by the number of Turkish immigrants but also by flows of Syrian refugees through Turkey to the EU member states.

Conclusion

This overview discusses how the extant studies measure anti-immigrant attitudes in exploring EU citizens’ opposition to European integration. We provide a detailed assessment of the European literature covering a large body of work over the last decade. The review of journal articles indexed in the SSCI reveals that attitudes toward immigrants play an important role in the formation of public opinion about the EU and its policies.

Existing studies as well as the articles in this issue indicate that European citizens are likely to view others in terms of in-group and out-group processes. Economic, cultural, and socio-demographic characteristics of immigrants in the countries provide the EU citizens with the very clues necessary to define these out-groups (Erisen and Kentmen-Cin, 2017). If they think that immigrants are a threat, they develop negative attitudes toward the EU integration as it is based on the idea of removing borders and promoting ‘unity in diversity’ (Lubbers and Coenders, 2017). Furthermore, threats posed by immigrants give an idea about how the EU accession of the immigrants’ country of origin could harm EU citizens and their national community (Erisen, 2017; Steenbergen and Siczek, 2017). Thus, anti-immigrant attitudes are also related to support for EU enlargement (Azrout and Wojcieszak, 2017).

These arguments rest on general assumptions about who those immigrants are. However, extant measures of anti-immigrant attitudes cannot satisfactorily differentiate between specific threats posed by various immigrant groups. The existing literature has the tendency to treat immigrants as a homogenous group who always present similar types of threats to native communities. In order to understand how anti-immigrant sentiments are related to opposition to European integration, future research needs to identify who those immigrants are more specifically and why EU citizens are anxious about them. Since the perceived economic, security, and cultural threats from immigrants are contingent on the quality and quantity of contact with immigrants, and ethnic, religious, socio-demographic, and political characteristics of immigrants, these also need to be measured more precisely.

Finally, we would like to end our discussion by drawing attention to the need for further research on the behavioral determinants of individual attitudes and opinion on immigration and immigrants. Future works could cover topics such as emotional reactions toward immigrants, media coverage and framing of immigrants and immigration, greater tolerance and mutual understanding of social unity as an integral part of European integration, and the foundations of democratic values shared by those immigrants who already comprise an important part of the European public.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA) in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program (GEBIP). All mistakes remain our own.

Notes

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