The Role of Christianity and Islam in Explaining Prejudice against Asylum Seekers: Evidence from Malaysia

Ethnic differences and predictors of racial and religious discriminations among Malaysian Malays and Chinese

“…Although previous studies have determined demographic factors being predictors of discrimination (Cowling & Anderson, 2019;Franssen et al, 2013;Wang & Froese, 2020), in contrast, this present study has only found them as being inconsistent and need to be further examined. Some demographic variables were initially significant predictors in the early blocks of the models, such as ethnicity but then became nonsignificant after the inclusion of discrimination toward a specific group was added as predictors.…”

“…A higher prevalence of discrimination exhibited by Malays is expected due to the ethnicity being the slightly more dominant group, with more power and voice in the society compared to Chinese (J. C. H. Lee, 2018). It is also anticipated that other factors might be able to predict discrimination, as previous research suggests, such as age (Franssen et al, 2013), education (Wang & Froese, 2020), religion (Brown et al, 2018;Cowling & Anderson, 2019), and other discriminatory attitudes (Aminnuddin, 2019b;Haney, 2016).…”

“…Previous research relevant to race in Malaysia, and to a certain extent, religion, is either on hiring decision (H. A. Lee & Abdul Khalid, 2016), choice of school types for children (Ismail, 2018), attitudes toward diversity (Brown et al, 2018), immigrant workers (Noor & Shaker, 2017), or asylum seekers (Cowling & Anderson, 2019). Other research includes national unity between ethnic groups (Azlan et al, 2018;Azlan, 2019) and the colonial construction of race (Reddy & Gleibs, 2019).…”

Teacher perceptions of the barriers and facilitators of education amongst Chin refugees in Malaysia: A qualitative analysis.

“…For example, Malaysians tend to associate refugees with criminality, view them as threats to job security, and see them as being carriers of the disease (Crisp et al, 2012; Munir-Asen, 2018). A study by Cowling and Anderson (2019) provided evidence that Malaysian participants held both explicit (i.e., conscious) and implicit (i.e., nonconscious) forms of prejudice toward asylum seekers. In addition, the results also indicated a strong religious out-group exacerbation effect, whereby higher levels of prejudice were directed toward Muslim asylum seekers than Christian asylum seekers by Christian Malayains (and vice versa for Muslim Malaysians whereby a higher level of prejudice was directed toward Christian asylum seekers than Muslim asylum seekers).…”

Dimensions of religiousness and their connection to racial, ethnic, and atheist prejudices

“…Immigrants, who may hold different religious beliefs than their host nation, are often targets of prejudice. Consistent with a religious intergroup bias [ 41 ], Christians and Muslims in Malaysia report negative attitudes toward asylum seekers affiliated with other religions [ 42 ]. A meta-analysis of 37 also studies shows religious affiliation, but not self-reported degree of religiosity, predicted self-reported negative attitudes toward migrants [ 43 •• ].…”