Immigration and Receiving Communities: The Utility of Threats and Emotions in Predicting Action Tendencies toward Refugees, Asylum‐Seekers and Economic Migrants

Abstract

Traditional accounts of intergroup bias often fail to consider the complexity of intergroup phenomena by insufficiently distinguishing between (a) attitudes, emotions and action tendencies, (b) classes of threat that promote intergroup bias and (c) subtle category distinctions amongst social groups. We develop a nuanced account of antimigrant bias by distinguishing between (a) manifestations of bias in emotions and action tendencies, (b) kinds of threat that drive antimigrant bias, and(c) kinds of migrant groups (economic migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers). By employing within-subjects designs in two prominent migrant-receiving countries (N Australia = 239, N US = 200), we find that two distinct classes of threat emerge: in-group morality threat and conflict-related threat. These threats predict specific emotion and action tendency profiles. Our findings carry important implications for the conceptualization of antimigrant bias. We also discuss implications of our findings for facilitating positive relations between receiving communities and migrants via in-group morality threat.The world is facing a migration crisis-immigration rates are at an unprecedented high and at least 65 million people are currently displaced worldwide (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017). Understanding prejudice and discrimination toward migrants is thus essential for ensuring their

Identity Inclusiveness and Centrality: Investigating Identity Correlates of Attitudes toward Immigrants and Immigration Policies

“…These results suggest that inclusive identities are positively related with attitudes toward the immigration target directly involved in the representation, but such positive relation may not generalize to more distal immigration targets, like North African immigrants or immigrants in general. While unexpected, these dissociations between immigration attitude indicators have some resemblance to documented differences in sensitivity between affective and cognitive indicators of outgroup attitudes reported in the literature (Abeywickrama, Laham, & Crone, ; Paolini, Hewstone, & Cairns, ; Tropp & Pettigrew, ). Also, in a similar vein, Dixon, Durrheim, and Tredoux () found dissociations between personally held attitudes toward ethnic equality and responses to related policy issues.…”

“…Future research could further examine the potential differential impact of different conceptualizations of national identity on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies that are framed in both positive and negative ways, white carefully controlling for weight of affect, cognitions, and behavior. Additionally, future studies could also consider the specific type of migrant (e.g., economic migrant, refugee, asylum seeker) as research shows differences on threat appraisals, emotions and behavioral intentions when those different labels are activated (e.g., Abeywickrama et al., ; Hartley & Pedersen, ). This could be particularly relevant to better inform policy makers.…”

What is threatening about refugees? Identifying different types of threat and their association with emotional responses and attitudes towards refugee migration

“…Previous research in the context of refugee migration has mainly focused on one threat dimension covering symbolic, realistic, safety, and/or health concerns (e.g., Louis, Duck, Terry, Schuller, & Lalonde, 2007;Yitmen & Verkuyten, 2018), but only a few studies have explicitly distinguished between different threat types elicited by refugee migration (e.g., Abeywickrama, Laham, & Crone, 2018;Tartakovsky & Walsh, 2016). Furthermore, extensive refugee migration due to war and persecution can be accompanied by far-reaching changes in the receiving society.…”

The Reception of Immigrants and Refugees in Western Countries: The Challenges of Our Time

“…Noteworthy too, in the empirical articles, the reception of immigrants and refugees is examined in studies in a diverse range of contexts, focusing on Sicilian primary school teachers and a representative and large sample of U.S. voters (Espinosa et al., ), U.S. citizens, identified as White American (Mukherjee, Adams, & Molina, ), U.S.‐based White, Latino, and Asian samples (Huo, Dovidio, Jiménez, & Schildkraut, ), representative U.S., German, and Australian samples from the World Values Survey (Shin & Dovidio, ), Australian and U.S. citizens (Abeywickrama, Laham, & Crone, ), U.S. citizens (Marshall & Shapiro, ), and German residents who live close to a reception center for refugees and immigrants (Kotzur, Tropp, & Wagner, ). Adding to this breadth, these diverse samples are studied in five major immigrant and refugee receiving countries: Italy, the United States, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland (see Table ).…”

“…Abeywickrama et al. () found in two studies among Australian and U.S. based samples that different migrant groups (economic migrants, refugees, asylum‐seekers) evoked different threats. Distinguishing in‐group morality threat from conflict‐based threat, they found that both types of threat predicted emotions and anti‐migrant bias.…”