How the Social Costs of taking Refugees Influence Attitudes towards Immigration

Immigration is currently the most saliant issue across Europe. The current war in Syria and the resulting dramatic refugee movements raise the subject in scope and importance to the top level of current politics in Europe. In the literature, there is an ample discussion about the influences of egotropic and sociotropic concerns on attitudes towards immigration. Hypotheses about egotropic motivations can be clearly formulated and describe constellations of variables, which have a clear causal direction. The results however show that the influence of these factors, if at all, is relatively weak. Variables describing sociotropic motivations have strong connections with attitudes to immigration, but on the other hand, they are very susceptible to attitudinal-consistent response styles and endogenous constellations of variables. Our article focuses on the distinct influences of different social costs on the willingness of the population to take refugees. Most of the experimental oriented research in the field employs experimental designs, which focus on the attributes of refugees/immigrants (e.g. Bansak et al. 2016). Complimentary to these approaches, we employ a factorial design where we vary potential social consequences of taking refugees (e.g. rising public debt, rising rental rates, declining level of social assistance, rising crime, success of right parties and right-wing violence). Beside our experimental variables, we also consider respondent-level data like ethnocentrism, values, and populism. From the perspective of political philosophy (e.g. Singer 1997), it is particularly interesting to see which social costs, that are generated by helping people, are considered reasonable and which are not. From the perspective of political psychology, we are interested in how inter-individual differences can be explained by different values and ideologies.