Abstract
Throughout time, economic crises have played a notable role in shaping and changing attitudes towards immigration, both in the United States and in Europe. Drawing from survey data and other sources, the chapter focuses on how the current Great Recession affects the perception of Latin American immigration from a comparative standpoint. We address the role played by an array of factors in activating or changing attitudes towards immigration during the different phases of the crisis. In the United States, although material interests might be expected to have a major effect on predicting the type of perception of immigration held by the native population in times of crisis, some authors have found that not a general but a specific ethnocentrism (together with factors such as the role of the media and socio-historical contexts) prevails over explanations of opinion across a wide variety of immigration policies and concerns. This paper attempts to contrast these and other findings highlighting the perceptions among white Americans towards Hispanics (the group that comes to mind when the topic of discussion is immigration in the U.S.) with perceptions of Latin American immigration in Spain. We include in the analysis variables such as group size, ethno-nationality and social class, among others.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Special Eurobarometer 380 (TNS 2012a), Spain stood as the third most favorable to labor immigration (51 %), behind the Finns (56 %) and the Swedes (60 %). As for political asylum, the most favorable countries were Sweden (95 %), Denmark (92 %) and the Netherlands (91 %). Spain stood in eleventh position (85 %).
- 2.
When OBERAXE-CIS surveys pose hypothetical assumptions in order to allow the entry of immigrants or not, the cultural criterion (translated by the indicator “adaptation to the lifestyle of the country”) continues to be the main one, slightly ahead of the economic and employment criterion (e.g. “they should have a job qualification that Spain needs”), both before and during the economic crisis, with an average score of 7.8 in 2008 and 7.95 in 2012 (for the economic and employment criterion, mean percentages are 7.2 in 2008 and 7.4 in 2012).
- 3.
In the light of the evidence on stereotyping and ethnocentrism, the education effect is more likely to highlight differences in tolerance, ethnocentrism, sociotropic assessments, or political correctness than is exposure to competition from immigrants (Citrin et al. 1997; Card et al. 2012; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2013).
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D’Ancona, M.Á.C., Valles Martínez, M.S. (2015). Changes in the Perception of Latin American Immigrants in Host Countries During the Great Recession. In: Aysa-Lastra, M., Cachón, L. (eds) Immigrant Vulnerability and Resilience. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14797-0_7
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