Is it “We are Enough or There are Enough”? – A Path-Analysis of Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward Immigration Using Evidence from the Immigrant German Election Study

In the course of the past decade, migration as well as its regulation have been very prevalent topics in both the public and the scientific discourse. Much scholarly attention focusses on explaining individuals’ attitudes towards migrants as well as individual characteristics explaining attitudes towards migration. Furthermore, the majority of these studies have analysed the correlates of migration rejection within the majority population. However taking the attitudes of individuals with migration background into consideration offers valuable insights in both the public opinion structure towards immigration and its explanatory factors. In order to achieve this insight, this paper aims to identify what explains negative attitudes towards migration in people with a migration background. This paper uses established explanations of migration rejection such as economic self-interests, ideology-based explanations and realistic group conflict theory to test whether general explanations of migration rejection are valuable for migrants. It further focusses on the effects of social identities, mainly of the identification with the host nation, country of origin, and ethnic group following the social identity approach by Tajfel and Turner (1979) to analyse the impact of identities on migration. This paper draws on new data from a representative survey of the biggest two immigrant groups in Germany: Germans of Turkish descent and Resettlers from the former Soviet Union (n= 1,020, Aug-Nov 2017). Believing that the theoretical explanations are causally linked, this paper tests for hypothesized correlations using Path Models. Furthermore, the effect of the ethnic set-up of the neighbourhood on attitudes towards immigration is analysed to control for contextual effects.