Anti-Immigrant Attitudes: The Effect of Grievances, Personal Interactions and Entrenched Beliefs

This book compares anti-immigrant attitudes across 8 countries on 5 continents. It develops a general framework that explores grievances, personal interactions, and entrenched beliefs that explain anti-immigrant attitudes. Using original survey research with 1,000 respondents per country, the authors test the salience of their theoretical expectations across eight very diverse cases: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Africa, the USA, and Turkey. The empirical study allows to decipher the degree to which the drivers of anti-immigrant attitudes are universal or context-specific. One the one hand, they find that positive interactions between natives reduce critical attitudes toward immigrants in all 8 countries. On the other hand, there are some country specific differences in the influence of various grievances and the three proxy variables measuring entrenched beliefs populist attitudes, nationalism and social conservativism. This book appeals to scholars and students of political sociology, comparative politics, public opinion research and related fields.