Placing Xenophobia in Context – Anti-iMmigrant Attitudes across Economic, Cultural and Human Security Contexts

• In Event: 549 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Xenophobia and Racialization

Abstract

Cross-national analyses of immigration attitudes emphasize economic and cultural threat, contact with immigrants, and context in the production of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, to date few cross-national analyses have incorporated emerging immigration societies outside of Western Europe and the Americas, nor have they attended closely to institutional and sociopolitical features of the macro-context. Moreover, efforts to model the impacts of national security events upon xenophobia have been relatively rare in previous scholarship. Our paper delineates an analytical framework that builds upon three overarching contextual domains—economic, cultural, and national security—writ at the macro- and micro-level, which we posit to influence tendencies toward xenophobia. Using data from the World Values Survey for 63 countries we conduct a we use multi-level analysis with mixed effects logistic regression models to explore the effects of economic context, cultural context and national security events on xenophobic policy attitudes. We find support for all three contextual domains, with the economic and national security domains demonstrating the most consistent association with immigration attitudes.

Authors

• Yvette Young, University of Utah

• Peter Joseph Loebach, Weber State University

• Kim M. Korinek, University of Utah