Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes in Europe, the United States and East Asia

• In Event: In-Group/Out-Group Politics

Abstract

Across Europe and North America, an urban vs. rural divide characterizes attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy (Brownstein 2016; de Wilde et al. 2019). Residents in urban areas exhibit more support for open borders than residents in rural areas, either because the cosmopolitan environment provide them more opportunities to interact with foreigners in positive ways (Heerden and Ruedin 2019), or because people who are more supportive of foreigners select into living in urban areas (Maxwell 2019, 2020; Kustov, Laaker and Reller 2020). Yet, some of the most urban (or urbanizing) countries in East Asia have levied restrictive immigration rules on their growing population of foreigners. For example, both Japan and Korea have implemented immigration policies that admit more foreigners to cope with their labor shortage problems, but include no plans for integrating these foreigners into their countries. Do restrictive policies occur because neither contextual nor compositional effects of cosmopolitanism transmit to East Asian countries, or because there are powerful factions within them that push for restrictive immigration laws against the will of the urban majority? Using data from the 2014 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and 2017-2020 World Values Survey (WVS), we answer this question by comparing determinants of support for immigrant admittance and integration in Europe, the United and East Asia.

Authors

• Fan Lu, Queen's University

• Gento Kato, Nazarbayev University