Fear or Competition? Antecedents to U.S. Business Student Immigration Attitudes

Immigration is an important and contemporary topic in management education given its impact on labor, wages, innovation, and diversity. However, extant research offers few insights into the antecedents to student immigration attitudes. Survey data from undergraduate students taking business courses at two large public universities in the southeast U.S. reveal that while student attitudes toward immigration are more moderate than the general U.S. population, these attitudes differ by gender, political affiliation, and immigration background. Following realistic conflict theory and social identity theory, these student immigration attitudes are a function of both fear and competition. First, their attitudes are confounded by conflicting antecedents in perceived personal competition for resources with immigrants (e.g., jobs, wages) versus immigration benefits (e.g., costs, labor base, innovation). Second, xenophobia (fear of immigrants) is a remarkably powerful influencer of one’s immigration attitude and its antecedents. With these points, management educators must engage students in critical thinking about immigration to prepare them to effectively work with diverse colleagues and business partners while leading global organizations. We, therefore, present four cross-disciplinary areas of intersection between immigration and management education, including diversity and cultural intelligence, human resource management and ethics, entrepreneurship and innovation, and finally, economic and socioeconomic impacts.

The Effect of Immigrant Integration Policies on Public Immigration Attitudes: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in the United Kingdom

Drawing on intergroup threat theory, this article argues that immigrant integration policies can improve public attitudes toward immigrants and, particularly, toward refugees and asylum-seekers. Examining evidence from an original survey experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, I find that support for admitting asylum-seekers increases when respondents are made aware that prospective asylum-seekers will be required to partake in language and civic-education courses. This effect is particularly strong among respondents who were more likely to perceive asylum-seekers as a symbolic threat (i.e., conservatives). Similarly, support for admitting asylum-seekers increases when respondents are told that future asylum-seekers will only have limited access to welfare. This effect is stronger among respondents who were more likely to view asylum-seekers as a material threat (i.e., conservatives and individuals with low socioeconomic status). These findings have important implications for the literatures on immigrant integration policies, intergroup threat theory, and public immigration attitudes generally. Importantly, the results reported in this article illustrate the significance of structural determinants for the study of immigration attitudes and demonstrate the importance of disaggregating immigrant integration policies when evaluating their effects.

Examining Moral Foundations Theory through Immigration Attitudes

Moral foundations theory (MFT) explains how political and cultural attitudes are shaped significantly by people’s moral intuitions; gut-level judgments about proper human behavior and social relationships. We examine the theory through the topic of immigration attitudes. Social scientists of various stripes have built a comprehensive research program studying public attitudes towards immigrants and immigration policy. Immigration is currently among the most contentious political issues in the United States and Europe—evidenced in part by the election of Donald Trump, the UK’s Brexit vote, and the recent rise of nationalist parties on the continent. Drawing on MFT and using one politically diverse sample and one liberal-leaning sample, we conducted two experiments respectively, to test whether effects of political orientation on US immigration attitudes may be moderated by alternative moral framing of pro-immigration appeals. Data support hypotheses, and is consistent with theoretical claims about moral diversity and political attitudes generally. Also, results shed new light on how shifts in immigration attitudes, that is whether one entrenches further into an original position or is persuaded into a new attitude, depend on one’s place on the political spectrum. Keywords: moral foundations theory, moral foundations, immigration, attitudes, moral intuition, experiment

Immigration, Race, and Nation in the UK: The Politics of Belonging on Twitter

At a time of rising right-wing populism, the heightened political salience of immigration as an issue is linked to conceptions of ‘the national’. In this article, we analyse tweets from non-elites, defined as isolated users with low network influence, engaged in a ‘conversation’ about migration on Twitter. We investigate the values embedded in these attitudes, and what these tell us about constructions and contestations of the symbolic boundaries of the nation among ordinary people. Our corpus includes tweets posted in temporal proximity to the lifting of transitional controls on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in the UK (1 October 2013 to 1 March 2014). Thematic analysis reveals a cohesive set of anti-immigrant or anti-immigration sentiments linked to UKIP and that express an exclusionary nationalism based on assumptions about race, ‘whiteness’ and entitlement. Also evident is a counter-narrative of pro-immigration sentiments that draw on multiple and sometimes contradictory values. Some of these values contest racialised understandings of the nation but do not coalesce in ways to disrupt the dominance of right-wing anti-immigrant sentiments on Twitter. Our findings demonstrate the importance of investigating values embedded in both anti and pro-immigration attitudes among non-elites and what these values indicate about the possibilities of re-framing migration debates among non-elites in ways that construct more inclusive symbolic national boundaries. In addition, in using the networked properties of Twitter engagement to identify non-elite users, we make a methodological contribution to scholarship on immigration attitudes.