But Aren’t You Migrants as Well?! How National and Ethnic Identities Affect Immigrants' Out-Group Attitudes Towards the Majority Population and Other Migrant Groups – Evidence from the Immigrant German Election Study

In-group identifications and their impact on attitudes towards out-groups have become more and more the center of scholarly attention. These social identities, that encompass e.g. identifications with one’s nation, ethnic group or religious denomination, have been analyzed in many studies so far. Most of the previous studies analyzed the impact of national or European identity of the majority population on political attitudes – identifications may have positive (solidarity) or, more often, negative (prejudice, xenophobia) implications. Studies analyzing the consequences of social identity for minorities are scarce as the number of immigrants in most data sets is too low for multivariate analyses of immigrants’ attitudes. However, we argue that the study of immigrants’ attitudes towards the majority population and other immigrants, also offers valuable insights in the relationship of social identities and cultural and political attitudes towards out-groups. This paper aims to investigate how the identification with the host nation, country-of-origin, and ethnic group affects immigrants’ attitudes towards the majority population, other established migrant groups, and the new influx of refugees. We use a theoretical framework that mainly draws on the social identity approach by Tajfel and Turner (1979) and Turner et al. (1994) as well as realistic group conflict theory (Sherif et al. 1961) to derive a general model of out-group rejection for migrants. We draw on new data from a representative survey of the biggest two immigrant groups in Germany: Germans of Turkish decent and Resettlers from the former Soviet Union (n=1,020, Aug-Nov 2017). Furthermore, we analyze the effect of the ethnic set-up of the neighborhood on attitudes towards out-groups. Thereby, our analysis further contributes to the understanding of the effect of different social identities on out-group attitudes.