Conferences

Mass migration to Europe is a historically recent phenomenon, having commenced within the past fifty years in all the countries which have experienced it. As a result, all of Europe?s diversifying societies contain cohorts who grew up in an ethnically more homogeneous, pre-migration society and cohorts who have grown up in a more diverse national (though not necessarily local) context since mass migration began. These differences in socialisation conditions could have an important impact on attitudes to minorities, analogous to the socialisation effects on attitudes found by researchers such as Mannheim (. However, cohort differences in attitudes towards minorities, and the socialisation effects which may produce them, have only been examined in individual country case studies. Ford (2008) finds evidence that cohorts socialised since mass migration began in Britain have become progressively less hostile to minorities, while Coenders et al (2008) find that in the Netherlands levels of migration and unemployment in youth have a lasting impact on attitudes to immigrant minorities.

This paper seeks to extend these national studies into a comparative context, utilising data from the 2003 European Social Survey on Western European countries which have experienced large scale migration settlement from outside Europe. The analysis examines hostility to immigrant minorities, measured using items which identify discriminatory preferences in housing, employment and marriage and opposition to laws combating ethnic and racial discrimination. The cohort distribution of these discriminatory preferences in each country is examined and then multilevel models are constructed to test the impact of both present social and political conditions and the conditions prevalent during the respondent’s youth on these attitudes. The social conditions examined include the effects of contextual diversity, economic insecurity, and migration rates. The political conditions tested include the impact of incumbent governments pursuing restrictionist or assimilationist immigration policies and the effects of the presence of prominent anti-immigration political actors, such as extreme right parties or anti-immigration press campaigns. As well as these contextual factors, the impact of individual factors such as education, direct social contact with immigrant minorities, unemployment and social class are also examined.