Cultural solidarity, economic threat: How discrimination influences anti-immigrant attitudes

Studies on the attitudes of minorities toward immigrants have produced mixed results, as while some suggest that minorities are more tolerant of immigrants, others find minorities resemble majority groups in their attitudes. We argue these inconsistencies stem from differences in how people evaluate immigrants’ cultural and economic impacts. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme linked with group-level measures of political, economic, religious, and linguistic discrimination from the Minorities at Risk and Ethnic Power Relations datasets, we examine how minority and majority groups assess immigration across economic and cultural dimensions. We find that minority group members are significantly less likely than majority group members to view immigrants as a cultural threat, yet they express similar levels of concern about the economic impacts of immigration. This suggests that minority groups may feel a sense of solidarity with immigrants based on shared experiences of discrimination, which reduces perceptions of immigrants as a cultural threat, even as their concerns about economic competition remain similar to those of majority groups. We conclude that anti-immigrant sentiment is multidimensional, which helps clarify how social position shapes attitudes.