Introduction
With the rise of Donald Trump from the United States and Marine Le Pen from France, there seems to be an anti-immigration sentiment sweeping across western democracies. With more citizens voting for political candidates with anti-immigration stance, has native population’s tolerance for immigrants reached a historic low across the world? This essay endeavours to examine the relationship between immigration and tolerance, in particular the tolerance from a country’s native population to its immigrants.
Like any social study, an unambiguous definition of the subject in question is often difficult to reach. In this instance, it is ‘tolerance’ that needs to be fully understood. Nonetheless, the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study provides some guidance, where ‘tolerance’ should incorporate the following elements:
- An opportunity to speak one’s own language;
- An opportunity for education at the same standard as that of education received by locals;
- A right to vote after living in a country for many years;
- An opportunity to maintain one’s own custom and lifestyle;
- Having the same rights as that of locals.
If a country’s local residents agree that immigrants are entitled to the five elements above, then they are highly tolerant to immigrants, and vice versa.
This essay will first examine the origin of negative views towards immigrants among native population, then introduce a leading theory on how immigration can strengthen tolerance, and finally detail a case study to demonstrate the theory at work.
Root cause analysis
It cannot be denied that immigration has its problems, otherwise there would not be so many public voices against it. What is important is to understand where and how the problems arise, so sensible solutions can be devised.
A good starting place is to ask where locals’ negative views towards immigrants come from? In his paper Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition, Daniel Hopkins from Georgetown University argues that negative views do not come from locals’ personal experience, but from ‘sudden influxes of immigrants’ and ‘salient national rhetoric’.
It is not difficult to appreciate how sudden influxes of immigrants can provoke local opposition. People have a natural tendency to resist change, and a sudden influx of immigrants is a substantial change to which people must adapt. This creates confusion and frustration, which lead to negativity towards the actor of the change, in this case immigrants.
It is more complicated to dive into the mechanism by which public rhetoric influences people’s opinions, and the space in this essay does not allow an expanded discussion. It suffices to say that, without these two conditions (sudden influxes of immigrants and national rhetoric), there is no apparent negative attitude towards immigrants. Local demographics usually go unnoticed without the two conditions. A negative view towards immigrants is not the norm; it is an exceptional case when two very specific conditions are met.
Hopkins’ research illustrates that the trouble does not lie with immigration itself. Having immigrants join the local community is a change to which people find hard to adjust, just like all other changes. But this does not mean the change is inherently bad and should be avoided. Furthermore, people are manipulated by politicians who wish to gain election support by invoking strong public opinion. In the long run, immigration does not necessarily result in a decrease in tolerance.
Doing immigration the right way
If immigration is not inherently flawed, how can a nation make it work? The most prominent idea is contact theory, pioneered by psychologist Gordon Allport from Harvard University. The theory states that different groups of people can reduce prejudice against each other by establishing and maintaining interpersonal contact. Since Allport’s paper in 1954, hundreds of subsequent studies have affirmed the same result. But to judge the validity of the theory, one must carefully scrutinise the rationale behind its conclusion.
A very comprehensive analysis of contact theory is the paper How does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Meta-analytic tests of three mediators by Thomas Pettigrew from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Linda Tropp from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This paper analyses three processes by which interpersonal contact can reduce prejudice: by enhancing knowledge of the outgroup, by reducing fear and anxiety of intergroup contact, and by increasing empathy and appreciating the perspectives of the outgroup. The study finds that anxiety reduction and empathy boost are more effective mediators than knowledge enhancement. Pettigrew and Tropp give strong evidence that by reducing anxiety and increasing empathy, interpersonal contact does in fact reduce prejudice.
On face value, it then seems that government should encourage intergroup contact and enact policies to that end. This is not necessarily so. It is inevitable for people living in the same country to interact; it is just a matter of time. Mutual understanding is only genuine when it takes place naturally, without deliberate outside force. Any policy aimed at encouraging contact may have unintended consequences and cause resentment. Policy makers must be aware that contact cannot be made instantaneously and genuine connection cannot occur overnight, so the harmony between immigrants and locals can take a long time to arrive, sometimes decades.
Patience is key
A very good example of contact taking time to occur is detailed in the paper Do Ethnically Mixed Classrooms Promote Inclusive Attitudes Towards Immigrants Everywhere? A Study Among Native Adolescents in 14 Western Countries by Jan Janmaat from the Institute of Education. An interesting result is found: school children in classes where there are more second generation immigrants than first generation immigrants are more tolerant to immigrants. What’s more, is that in those classes, the larger the immigrant group size (including both first and second generation immigrants), the more inclusive the view towards immigrants. On the other hand, there is no observed relationship between immigrant group size and tolerance in classes where there are more first generation immigrants than second generation immigrants. These results can be explained by the fact that second generation immigrants tend to have a better command on the host country’s native language and first generation immigrants have not had the time to establish many contacts and friendships with native students. This shows that time is required for contact to be established (in this case, decades), thus patience is needed for tolerance to be built.
Another result in the paper, which coincidentally reinforces the contact theory, is that high tolerance is only found in classes with high or medium proportion of immigrant students. This is powerful result as it suggests that the way to strengthen tolerance is to boost ethnic mixing in school, not the other way around. If immigrant students only constitute a small proportion of the class, then native students have the chance to avoid contact with immigrants, thus hampering the anxiety reduction and empathy building advocated by contact theory. When immigrant students are proportionally many, it forces the native students to interact with immigrants, hence producing the results predicted by contact theory. This gives strong indication to policy makers and school principals that diversity in schools should be encouraged.
Conclusion
It is true that sudden influxes of immigrants may be something to which the native population finds difficult to adapt, but tolerance would not be obstructed if it was not for the politicians who tried to appeal to citizens by invoking exclusivity. Contact theory gives compelling evidence that tolerance will be achieved by allowing the locals and immigrants to take the time to interact and make connection. Policy makers should let the inevitable interpersonal contact take place organically. The resulted harmony will take time to manifest, but it sure is worth the wait.
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