European identities and migration preferences

Identity matters for explaining attitudes towards the EU and also in the case of migration. But how? Most of the existing literature builds on a binary conceptualization of identity, which essentially distinguishes between EU citizens that have integrated some (not specified) form of a European identity – in contrast to those who have exclusively national identities. Not surprisingly, empirical studies show that exclusive national identities correlate with preferences for more restrictive migration policies. A shortcoming of this set-up is that the analytical link between identity and migration policy preference is rather loose, as the correlation between the two may only reflect that they correspond to a common latent dimension, and it ignores the multidimensionality of both identity and migration policy. We propose a more nuanced framework of identity which (a) distinguishes between a civic and cultural conception and (b) varies in how citizens evaluate their own in-group vis-à-vis the out-group. In a second step, we aim to relate this conceptualization of identity to EU migration attitudes, where we distinguish between two forms of community membership and predict whom one prefers as a (a) member of the EU/European community or neighbor, and (b) migrant coming to the EU. We present the first results from our survey, including a conjoint experiment, evaluating the links between respondents' EU/European identity and their preferences regarding different types of migrants. The findings on how identity relates to migration attitudes will have important implications for the challenges of EU migration policy.