The wages of ethnic power: Socioeconomic status, group threat, and anti-immigrant attitudes in Western Europe

Group threat theories explain anti-immigrant attitudes as emerging from threats to the perceived or actual power of one’s ethnic group. Studies also show that individual-level socioeconomic status (SES) is negatively correlated with attitudes toward immigrants, where SES is often conceptualized as an individual-level variable which relates to an individual’s experience of economic competition or general political orientation. Here we argue that the effect of SES is conditional on an individual’s ethnic group’s power. Using data from the European Social Survey and Ethnic Power Relations datasets, we examine how interactions between ethnic group power and individual SES shape attitudes toward immigrants across 16 Western European countries. We find that majority group members generally exhibit more anti-immigrant attitudes than members of minority groups. SES is negatively correlated with anti-immigrant attitudes, generally, but especially for majority group members, where lower-SES individuals have the most anti-immigrant attitudes. At the highest levels of SES there are almost zero differences in anti-immigrant attitudes between majority and minority group members. Our results highlight the need to look to how the “psychological wages” of ethnic group power are influenced by individual SES.