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Good for the Common Good: Sociotropic Concern and Double Standards toward High- and Low-Skilled Immigrants in Six Wealthy Countries

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Abstract

Immigration policy has conventionally implied a double standard, in which high-skilled immigrants are more acceptable due to their potential contribution to the national economy, little welfare burden, and better cultural adaption, while low-skilled ones are not favored, because of a belief in their limited contribution to the common good. In contrast to the egocentric interest explanation, we emphasize the importance of such sociotropic concerns and suggest that acceptance of immigrants with different skill levels is an outcome of perceived growth and distributional impacts or threatened cultural boundaries. Drawing data from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends: Immigration survey, we performed seemingly unrelated regression modelling to compare natives’ attitudinal responses in six wealthy countries. We found that in addition to the evidence that high-skilled immigrants are favored over low-skilled ones, the worry about welfare burden to the nation is one of the main factors causing locals to dislike low-skilled immigrants. The public who perceive immigrants’ threats to the national economy in terms of taking jobs away in general are also likely to disfavor high-skilled immigrants. Expectations of cultural assimilation are somewhat detached from acceptance of high-skilled immigrants. As the research results imply clear limitation of the double-standard perspective, we propose a new scheme for understanding both double- and single-standard views and incorporate these variations into the sociotropic theory and future research design.

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Notes

  1. “Natives” in this paper is used as a loose term to refer to the working population who have dwelt in the studied countries and thus are affected by incoming immigrants who are entering local labor markets. Some of them are born in countries where they live currently and are not possessors of citizenship. “Natives” and “locals” are used interchangeably. Moreover, the data set used in the research did not provide information about whether the interviewed respondents held citizenship or not.

  2. OECD data did not provide information on whether the immigrants earned their tertiary education degree from the origin or host country, which can have substantial implications in the labor market.

  3. Hainmueller and Hiscox (2010) probably are the first scholars to bring the sociotropic concept into studies of attitudes toward immigrants. They propose that individuals’ sociotropic concern of the national economy and culture probably can replace ego-centered interest theory in explaining attitudes toward immigrants. In political science, there are similar arguments. Kinder and Kiewiet (1981) propose a model of sociotropic politics, in contrast to pocketbook politics based on calculation of personal interests. They showed that American voters tend to support candidates and parties that can advance the national economy more than those who cater to narrower group interests.

  4. For more information please visit https://www.gmfus.org/publications/transatlantic-trends-immigration-2011.

  5. Founded in 1972 as a non-partisan and nonprofit organization through a gift from Germany as a permanent memorial to Marshall Plan assistance, the German Marshall Fund of the United States contributes research and analysis on transatlantic issues relevant to policymakers.

  6. This recoding scheme is applied also to other attitude variables.

  7. For instance, round seven of the European Social Survey in 2014 (ESS7) contained similar questions on attitudes toward high- and low-skilled immigrants. Yet the survey’s experimental design asked each respondent’s attitude toward only one type of immigrants. This design does not allow a direct comparison of each respondent’s different level of acceptance for two types of immigrants. Moreover, ESS7 referred to immigrants from a specific lower-income European country, paying insufficient attention to the fact that immigrants are very diverse in terms of geographical origin. In contrast, TTI allows simultaneous analysis of attitudes toward the two types of immigrants, which is more sensible for comparative investigation.

  8. We created a variable by selecting nine TTI survey questions related to attitudes toward immigrants from the model we analyze in this research, that is, two dependent variables and seven independent variables regarding immigrants’ economic and cultural impact and welfare burden (more information in the following), to count how many questions each respondent did not answer (refusal, no answer and don’t know). This variable thus had a range of 0-9. If respondents’ high non-answer scores on attitudes toward immigrants are correlated with their demographic characteristics, it indicates a possibility of nonresponse bias (Yan and Curtin 2010). Among the demographic factors, we chose gender, age, education, and residence area (urban and rural) for testing. The results showed no substantial association, because the correlation coefficients among them are below .1.

  9. One inconsistency exists in the two data sets but can be ignored. In general, except Spaniards, percentages of respondents welcoming immigrants were higher in ESS7 than those in TTI. This was because respondents in the advanced countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and France in ESS7 felt less threats because they were being asked about immigration from poor countries. This is different from the TTI, which covered immigrants from all over the world. In contrast, ESS7 respondents in a less advanced country such as Spain probably felt more threats from immigrants coming from poor countries.

  10. The total sample in this research was 5160 with 2.4% of missing data. Thus 5036 cases were analyzed as shown in Tables 2, 3 and 4.

  11. We note here that there is no contradiction in a simultaneous situation of creating jobs and taking jobs away. The former indicates creating jobs for people in either the same or different occupations, while the latter mainly refers to potential job loss of the locals with similar skill levels.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments. Rueyling Tzeng would like to extend her appreciation for the grant support from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (grant number MOST 103-2410-H-001-087). Ming-Chang Tsai is grateful to the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University in which he prepared this coauthored manuscript as a visiting scholar in 2017.

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  1. Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Rueyling Tzeng

  2. Center for Asia–Pacific Area Studies, RCHSS, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Rd, Sec. 2, Nangang, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan

    Ming-Chang Tsai

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  1. Rueyling Tzeng
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Correspondence to Ming-Chang Tsai.

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Tzeng, R., Tsai, MC. Good for the Common Good: Sociotropic Concern and Double Standards toward High- and Low-Skilled Immigrants in Six Wealthy Countries. Soc Indic Res 152, 473–493 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02429-1

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