Individual Attitudes toward Migrants: How to Define Citizenship

• In Event: Attitudes and Migrants

Abstract

What causes cross-nationally divergent public sentiment toward migrants, especially among advanced democratic destination countries in postwar era? This paper argues that citizenship law sets a fundamental frame for public perception toward migrants. It highlights this law’s function as a dividing line between insiders (natives) and outsiders (foreigners), and examines how individuals’ way of defining citizenship (individual level) as well as countries’ official citizenship law (national level) can impact public tolerance toward migrants. Specifically, by categorizing this law into jus soli (by soil or birthplace) and jus sanguinis (by blood or ancestry), it claims that individuals who stress ancestral ties, supporting jus sanguinis rule, would express more negative feelings toward migrants (Hypothesis 1 on individual level), and this tendency would be stronger among natives under jus sanguinis countries (Hypothesis 2 on national level).
In order to examine the relationship between citizenship law and individual perception toward migrants, I statistically test these hypotheses by merging National Identity II and III datasets by International Social Survey Program (2003 and 2013). As expected, linear regressions with country and year fixed effects find that individuals tend to become more pessimistic about migrants as they value blood ties more importantly, and this tendency is to be exacerbated in jus sanguinis countries. Furthermore, results on marginal effects yield that perceptions on immigrants are almost identically positive among those who detach themselves from ancestry aspect, regardless of what kind of domestic citizenship law they live under. Yet, the difference between people’s perceptions under the two citizenship laws becomes starker as their emphasis on blood aspect becomes stronger. In sum, the overall results confirm my hypotheses while jus soli rule helps ameliorating this potential anti-migration sentiment in both individual and national levels.

Author

• Yu Jin Woo, Waseda University