Inequality and attitudes toward immigration: the native-immigrant gap in Australia

ABSTRACT

How does local economic inequality affect the native-immigrant gap in immigration attitudes? Existing studies do not distinguish between native and immigrant citizens, which is problematic because immigrants represent an increasing share of the population and voting public. Immigrant citizens, as legal residents, receive the same legal and social protections as native citizens. However, as an out-group, they are less likely to be attached to the national and cultural identity of a host country. This paper uses the Australian Election Study to show that immigrant citizens prioritise cultural or psychological considerations in forming immigration attitudes. As local economic inequality rises, immigrant citizens’ support for immigration strengthens regardless of their country of origin, reason for migration and length of stay in Australia.     

Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment and the Adoption of State Immigration Policy

Over the last two decades, the American states have become increasingly active in shaping U.S. immigration policies. One consistent predictor in studies of state immigration policies revolves around public opinion or mass political attitudes in the form of anti‐immigrant sentiment. Unfortunately, past research relies extensively on blunt demographic proxies or other alternative replacements to measure mass opinion. Through incorporating a direct measure of anti‐immigrant sentiment constructed from public opinion surveys, we uncover mixed results. In static models, anti‐immigrant sentiment predicts a state’s overall immigration policy restrictiveness or policy “tone”; however, mass opinion fails to consistently predict immigration restrictiveness in more dynamic models of annual policy change and total number of hostile policies. We theorize that state legislators are likely responding to mass opinion with immigration policy restrictiveness when citizens mobilize and demand accountability during times of heightened issue salience. However, during times of reduced salience among the populace the influence of anti‐immigrant sentiment wanes, and commercial and political elites are seemingly able to shift individual immigration policies in more accommodative directions. Anti‐immigrant sentiment can motivate state immigration policy restriction, but likely only during select periods of heightened issue salience and attentive, engaged citizenry.     

The Vic Model: From school redistribution to xenophobic voting

In 1997, the authorities of Vic, a municipality with one of the highest immigration rates in Spain, implemented a programme called the Vic Model, which was a plan for the geographical redistribution or desegregation of immigrant students. The aim of the programme was to avoid the concentration or segregation of immigrants, which was defined as a problem, and to thereby dilute ethnic and cultural differences. According to scientific research, implementing such measures intensifies xenophobic and discriminatory attitudes among local populations. To analyse the relationship between this redistribution approach, which views immigrants as a burden, and xenophobic voting, we first document the examined case and then perform a quantitative analysis at both the regional and local levels by using demographic and electoral data. The results show an association between the assisted dissemination of immigrants throughout the municipality and an increase in xenophobic voting.     

Who Deserves Solidarity? Unequal Treatment of Immigrants in Swiss Welfare Policy Delivery

Rising immigration rates in Western Europe concur with increasing anti‐immigrant attitudes. While assessments of welfare eligibility in the United States demonstrably hinge on how public servants perceive different racial groups as deserving, we know less about ethnically motivated discrimination in the European context. This paper argues that Switzerland is a critical case for studying such developments. It combines social construction theory and the deservingness heuristic to analyze how social constructions of Swiss natives and immigrants influence 90 disability benefits insurance procedures. Findings reveal that immigrants are perceived as less deserving and less powerful than Swiss applicants. Thus, Swiss welfare workers do not allocate welfare benefits independently of an applicant's nationality. Our results raise fundamental questions about the equal treatment of welfare applicants in times of rising immigration and anti‐immigrant attitudes. The feed‐forward effects of social constructions imply longer‐term consequences for good administrative practices and society that require scholarly attention.     

The Impact of Temporary Immigrant Workforce Growth on Employee Verification Policies in the United States

The U.S. Department of Labor admits temporary immigrant workers to address labor shortages in local markets. Yet, do elected officials make it less difficult for some immigrants than others to secure employment in a state? Using U.S. temporary immigrant labor admissions data between 2006 and 2014, I examine the extent to which growth rates of main foreign‐born subgroups influence E‐Verify policies that require employers to authenticate the legal immigration status of employees. I find that state policymakers are less likely to enact E‐Verify policies in response to the growth of immigrants who work in specialty occupations (H‐1b visas). In contrast, the growth of immigrants working in nonspecialty occupations (H‐2a and H‐2b visas) increases the likelihood of enacting E‐Verify policies over time. The results suggest that policymakers release strict rules for employment only for highly educated immigrants who work in specialty occupations that offer higher paying salaries and career advancement opportunities. Disaggregating a monolithic foreign‐born population indicator into more specific class components provides an important contribution to public policy studies. Scholars will likely overlook the contrasting effects of specialty and nonspecialty immigrant workforce growth on policy decisions relating to immigrant employment.     

Minority nations and attitudes towards immigration: the case of Quebec

Growing international migration constitutes a tremendous challenge for contemporary democracies, no more so than for minority nations. An important challenge for the latter is one of acceptance of immigration from the native‐born population, in a context in which immigrant can be seen as both a cultural and a political threat. In this article we ask what explains attitudes towards immigration in minority nations. More specifically, we seek to provide answers to these questions: What is the impact of cultural insecurity on attitudes towards immigration in minority nations? Is strong attachment to a minority nation associated with less positive attitudes towards immigration? And finally, are proponents of independence for minority nations more likely to favour a reduction in the level of immigration than those who oppose it? The article seeks to answer these questions by exploring the case of Quebec.     

ARE IMMIGRANTS MORE MOBILE THAN NATIVES? EVIDENCE FROM GERMANY

Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. I use the Mikrozensus, a large annual sample of households living in Germany, to further our understanding of the underlying reasons. This paper makes two main contributions: first, the paper quantifies the disutility of migrating. To this end, I estimate conditional logit models of the migration decision across the German federal states. Second, I then focus on the differences between immigrants and natives. I find significantly higher responsiveness to labor market differentials in the immigrant population than in the native population. Unobserved moving costs for immigrants are estimated to be only about 31 percent of this same cost for natives. The findings bear on the assessment of the economic impact of immigration, and the paper contributes to the current immigration‐related policy debates that feature prominently in many European countries, and that likely will continue to be important in light of the ongoing EU expansion and the resulting east–west migration.     

Immigration and Refugee Crises in Fourth-Century Greece: An Athenian Perspective

Abstract

The fourth-century B.C. was a period during which a large number of Greek cities were affected by civil wars, military conquests, and destruction, with the displacement of large numbers of men, women and children as a result. This has implications for the modern debate on Athenian attitudes to immigration, which normally focuses on just two groups of free non-citizens: adult, able-bodied men who moved to Athens voluntarily to take advantage of the city’s economic opportunities and (more recently) on the free non-citizen population who had come to Athens as slaves and who stayed on after their manumission. This article argues that refugees were likely to have constituted a considerable component of the migration to Athens during certain troubled periods in the course of the fourth century. This means that the size of Athens’s immigrant population was likely to have fluctuated considerably, that many of the refugees would have been destitute, that women and children (sometimes unaccompanied by adult male relatives) may have made up an even greater proportion of the non-citizen population than normally assumed, and, thus, that a considerable number of these immigrants would not have been able to contribute substantially to Athens’s grain trade or military. The implications of this for our assessment of the Athenian motives for admitting groups of refugees are discussed, and it is argued that the requirement that all male and all unaccompanied female immigrants had to find an Athenian sponsor and pay a special metic tax may have constituted a certain level of control over immigrant numbers.     

The migration response to the Legal Arizona Workers Act

The 2008 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) requires all public and private employers to authenticate the legal status of their workers using the federal employment verification system known as E-Verify. With LAWA, Arizona became the first state to have a universal mandate for employment verification. While LAWA targets unauthorized workers, most of whom are Latino immigrants, other groups could experience LAWA's effects, such as those who share households with undocumented workers. In addition, employers may seek to minimize their risk of LAWA penalties by not hiring those who appear to them as more likely to be unauthorized, such as naturalized Latino immigrants and US-born Latinos. Existing research has found a reduction in foreign-born Latino employment and population in response to LAWA. This paper asks a different question: have groups that are most likely to be affected by the law migrated to other states? We find a significant and sustained increase in the internal outmigration rate from Arizona of foreign-born, noncitizen Latinos – the group most likely to include the unauthorized – after the passage of LAWA. There was no significant LAWA internal migration response by foreign-born Latino citizens. US-born Latinos showed some signs of a LAWA-induced internal migration response after the law went into effect, but it is not sustained. The results indicate that local and state immigration policy can alter the settlement geography of the foreign born. This leads us to speculate about how immigrant settlement may adjust in the coming years to the intersecting geographies of post-recession economic opportunity and tiered immigration policies.     

Placing immigrant identities

In this afterword to our special issue on immigrant identity and place, we explore the importance of place and context in forming immigrant identity, as well as the various ways in which immigrants make places. Discussions of immigrant adaptations often just consider reception at the national scale, whereas immigrants move into particular cities and towns. This article details some of the different ways that immigrants interact with their places, how the process of immigration introduces hybrid identities, and the differences in the immigrant experience by gender, status, and color.     

Immigrant Needs and Local Government Services

Upon their arrival in the United States, immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, impact the provision of local government services. Survey data collected from four immigrant groups (Nicaraguans, Haitians, Central Americans, and Mexicans) in Miami, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada examine the question of whether country of origin is a predictor of local government service utilization by immigrants. The findings suggest that immigrants, regardless of country of origin, share similar characteristics and attitudes regarding life in the United States. The major differences among the immigrant groups studied appear to be in their plans for the future. The Mexican respondents were likely to be described as sojourners, with plans to return to their home country, while the other groups intended to settle permanently in the United States. At the local level, these findings suggest that policymakers must be sensitive to motivations of the immigrants who locate in their areas, understanding the implications for service delivery in multilanguage, multiculture communities.     

Do Perceptions Match Reality? Comparing Latinos’ Perceived Views of State Immigration Policy Environments with Enacted Policies

This paper explores assumptions made and measurement approaches in the nuanced pathway between enacted state immigration policies and the outcomes they affect in Latino immigrant communities. Scholars across a variety of fields have found that contemporary state immigrant policymaking is associated with outcomes in immigrant communities including political engagement, mental and physical health, access to education, and labor opportunities. In this paper, we explore questions of how state immigration policies produce these and other outcomes. Much of this literature relies on the assumption that members of the immigrant communities are aware of the state policies being enacted, yet few quantitative studies of the effects of state immigration policy contain measures of both policy and of perception. We seek to determine the extent to which Latino immigrants are aware of state immigrant policymaking to help determine whether state immigration policies are a valid approach to measure perceptions of the immigration policy environment in Latino immigrant communities. Additionally, we explore alternative measures of immigration policy. Our findings are particularly relevant to policymakers and immigration scholars as the contemporary political environment has helped to fuel anti‐immigrant sentiments and rhetoric contributing to Latinos’ perceptions of the state immigrant policy environment.     

Democracy,decentralization, and district proliferation: The case of Ghana

In many developing countries, a rhetorical commitment to decentralization often superficially manifests through the creation of new or smaller administrative units at the sub-national level. In democracies in particular, this raises the question of whether sub-national unit proliferation is intended for winning popular support in elections or addressing the concerns of local citizens. This paper analyzes the motivations for district creation by focusing on Ghana, which is oft-considered one of Africa's more committed countries to decentralization. At the same time, successive governments repeatedly have divided the country into more districts in an espoused effort to more effectively bring services closer to citizens. With an in-depth focus on the most recent increase from 170 to 216 districts between 2008 and 2012, this paper employs national and district census, socioeconomic, and electoral data to examine which districts were split and why. Instead of representing a source of patronage to swing voters or a divide-and-rule strategy in opposition strongholds, the study finds that the incumbent party at the time, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), used re-districting as a tactic of malapportionment and predominantly targeted non-competitive districts where gaining an additional legislative seat in subsequent elections was more likely. Evidence suggests that this pattern is not specific to the NDC and that previous district splitting under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) also focused disproportionately on that party's safe seats. Overall, the paper emphasizes the need for according greater consideration to underlying institutional aspects, particularly electoral rules and executive-legislative relations, when analyzing the motivations for territorial reforms.     

Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment

Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare policy, including decisions about the eligibility of immigrant residents. Leveraging state‐level data from before and after reform, we estimate a difference‐in‐difference model to identify the effect of variation in immigrant inclusivity on educational attainment. We find that when states broaden the inclusivity of the social safety net to immigrants, young Latinos are more likely to graduate from high school. This effect is present beyond the group of Latino residents who receive additional benefits, suggesting that policy decisions about immigrants spill over to broader communities and communicate broader messages about social inclusion to racial and ethnic groups. We find similar patterns among Asian youth, but not among black and non‐Hispanic white youth. We conclude that immigrant inclusion has consequences for the life prospects of the growing population of youth in high‐immigrant ethnic groups.     

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the United States, along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this article, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native‐ and foreign‐born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post‐PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native‐foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional on the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states.     

Transnationalism and expatriate political engagement: the case of the Italian and French voting in Australia

The aim of this article is to provide an appreciation and analysis of the expatriate connectivity of Italian and French citizens from their place of residence in Australia through their respective elections in their home countries. Specifically, the article examines the case of Italians in Australia voting in the 2013 Italian elections and equally that of French citizens in Australia voting in the French presidential and the following legislative elections in 2017. The article examines the voting patterns there might be between those voting in their home country (Italy and France) and those voting in external electoral colleges (in this case, the relevant Australian college). The article shows that those living abroad—in this case, Australia—provide different political choices and less surprising low voting participation compared to the domestic districts. It also highlights that the transnational community can be, and is, influenced by the political context of their host country, which will be different from that which occurs in their home country.     

A few “big players”: Systems approach to immigrant employment in a mid-sized city

Canada's immigration policy is regarded globally as a best practice model for selecting highly skilled migrants. Yet, upon arrival many immigrants face challenges integrating into employment. Where immigrants settle is one factor that has been shown to impact on employment integration. In Canada, regionalization policies have resulted in more immigrants settling in small to mid-sized cities. It is important to understand how these local systems are organized to promote immigrant integration into employment. Using a systems approach, this paper presents a case study of immigrant employment in a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. Through a document review and stakeholder interviews, a systems map was developed, and local perspectives were analyzed. Results demonstrate that in a mid-sized city, few organizations play a large role in immigrant employment. The connections between these core organizations and the local labour market are complex. Any potential challenges to the system that interfere with these connections can cause a delay for newcomers seeking employment. As cities begin to experience growth driven by immigration, there is a need to ensure local services are not only available but also working effectively within the larger employment system.     

The Role of Public Opinion in US and Canadian Immigration Policies

Considering that the United States and Canada are neighboring North American countries with fairly similar liberal democratic political cultures, their immigration policies are noticeably different. While US policies prioritize family reunification, Canadian policies favor labor demands and employability. This difference reflects the varying degrees to which the public influences their respective immigration policies. Examining contemporary immigration policies of the United States and Canada, this paper compares the role of public opinion in each, and argues that public opinion plays a more prominent role in immigration policies in the United States than it does in Canada. This observation is due in part to the partisan nature of the US political structure and to the cohesiveness among immigrants, particularly Latinos. Canada, in contrast, favors a policy of multiculturalism that empowers immigrant groups and limits individual groups’ capacity and inclination to dominate policy decisions.     

Immigrants riding for justice: Space-time and emotions in the construction of a counterpublic

During the past two decades, a new immigrants’ rights movement in the U.S. has emerged, constructing a counterpublic that challenges hegemonic immigration discourses, policies, and practices. We show how a counterpublic is constructed in practice, using as a case study the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), an event in 2003 that helped further the momentum of immigrant rights activism. We examine how immigrant activists and their allies came together and worked to construct, articulate, and enact a shared political identity that we refer to as an identity-in-alliance. Space-time and emotions were crucial in the development of this identity as ‘Freedom Riders,’ as well as a sense of solidarity. We reflect on the vulnerabilities within the counterpublic and challenges it faced when inserting its discourses on immigration, race, and citizenship into the hegemonic public sphere. Taking the insights gained from these practices, we extend Nancy Fraser’s concept of the counterpublic by demonstrating the centrality of space-time and emotions to its theorization.     

Pauline Hanson,the Mainstream,and Political Elites: The Place of Race in Australian Political Ideology

Pauline Hanson is well known for claiming that Australia's major political parties are out of touch with 'mainstream' Australia on issues related to race. Parallel surveys of the electorate and candidates in the 1996 federal election allow this claim to be tested, with items tapping general ideological dispositions, but including questions about Aboriginal Australians, immigration, and links with Asia. I make three critical findings: the electorate holds quite conservative opinions on these issues relative to the candidates, and is quite distant from ALP candidates in particular; attitudes on racial issues are a powerful component of the electorate's political ideology, so much so that any categorisation of Australian political ideology ignoring race must be considered incomplete; racial attitudes cut across other components of the electorate's ideology, placing all the parties under internal ideological strains, but the ALP appears particularly vulnerable on this score. The data show the coalition parties to be the net beneficiaries of the ideological tensions posed by race. Racial issues thus resemble a realigning ideological dimension, with possibly far-reaching consequences for the conduct of Australian electoral politics. Racism is as Australian as lamingtons and sausage rolls but the real political leader is the man or woman who can appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature'. Robert Hughes (Lamont 1996)