Migration is an ever-increasing phenomenon that is unfailingly the topic of public discourse. Recently, empirical interest has expanded to include the study of attitudes towards immigration. However, the focus usually lies on the opinion of natives, that is, persons without a migration background. This is unfortunate, because in many countries the proportion of people with a migration background is quite high, and many of them hold the citizenship of the receiving country. I expect individuals with a migration background to have more favourable attitudes towards immigration than the general population because they can identify more strongly with other immigrants due to their own migration history. Furthermore, I expect this difference to decrease with each subsequent migrant generation, with earlier generations holding more positive attitudes than later generations. For the analyses, I pooled data from the 2008–2016 rounds of the American General Social Survey. The subsample used included 7,362 respondents, 2,811 of whom had a migration background. Moreover, the data set allowed the differentiation of three generations of migrants. The results support the theoretical expectations. Persons with a migration background had more favourable attitudes towards immigration compared to those without a migration background. However, a closer look revealed that this is the case only for first-generation immigrants. The attitudes of second- and third-generation immigrants differed from each other on the 5% level, but the attitudes of neither group differed from that of the general population when the migrants’ regional origins were controlled for.

For decades, social scientists have been interested in studying individual attitudes toward ethnic minorities or immigrants and their development over time. Whereas these attitudes have been commonly studied among adults, little is known about children’s and teenager’s attitudes toward immigrant minorities. This gap might have been a result of a lack of standardized, cost-effective, and efficient large-scale survey measures tailored to young people. In the current study, we try to overcome this gap by introducing and validating a new, child-friendly, easily administrable picture-based survey measure of attitudes toward immigrants belonging to two ethnic minorities: blacks and Muslims. For this purpose, we collected a panel dataset at three measurement time points in two countries, Switzerland and Poland, including 5332 school children and teenagers aged 8 to 19 years, divided into three age cohorts. We performed confirmatory factor analyses within and across the samples and found that the new picture-based measures were reliable and highly comparable across measurement time points, age cohorts, and country samples. The findings suggest that picture-based measures may be a promising tool to measure attitudes among children.

Research on key determinants of negative attitudes toward immigration has often suggested that values held by individuals systematically explain such sentiments. Universalists appear to have more positive and conservatives more negative attitudes. So far, however, these insights are based on studies using adult samples. In our study, we analyze these relations among children and adolescents. For the analysis, we utilized a Swiss-Polish panel dataset (2015–2017, N = 5,332) with three time points collected among school children aged 8–19 years. We employed autoregressive cross-lagged models. The results indicated that while universalism decreased negative attitudes toward immigrants, the expected effect for conformity-tradition was not found.

A key element of migrants’ well-being is their emotional integration, that is, the extent to which they perceive themselves as members of society and their identification with the country they are living in. To foster this sense of belonging, many integration programs aim to increase the migrants’ social integration, for example, by organizing events for migrants to meet natives in various settings. The validity of this strategy is supported by decades of international research. It remains unclear, however, which aspects of social integration are most relevant for national identification. Multiple theories concerned with contact and group identification support the assumption that contact to natives should foster a sense of belonging and national identification. However, for a contact situation to bear this potential, a certain set of criteria, including aspects like direct personal contact, a similar social status, and the presence of egalitarian norms, needs to be fulfilled. It is expected that these characteristics are more likely to be fulfilled within family and friendship settings than in contact situations within the employment context. Hence, I expect contact to natives within the network of friends and family to be more greatly associated with migrants’ national identification. I analyzed data from a 2013 cooperation between the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), that is, the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample, as well as the 2014 wave of the SOEP. The subsample used included 2,780 first- and second-generation migrants living in Germany. The results indicate that not all kinds of contact are equally linked to national identification. In contrast to expectations, in neither the cross-sectional models nor the lagged models was living together with native family members significantly linked to national identification. Similarly, the association between having predominantly native co-workers and national identification was insignificant when controlling for migrant-specific characteristics. Only the relation with having predominantly native friends was significant and positive across all models. This as well as a comparison of the associations lead to the conclusion that when it comes to migrants’ national identification native friends might be the most relevant form of contact to natives.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.