30 Years of Immigration and Prejudice: The Ambiguous Relationship Between Immigration and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe, 1990–2021
摘要
This chapter investigates how immigration and anti-immigrant attitudes have developed over a 30-year period in Central and Eastern Europe. We use data from the European Values Study and the UN population division to explore the possible relationship between changes in immigration and the public’s response to immigrants. Our analysis is twofold, first exploring contemporary immigration levels and anti-immigrant attitudes in the region, before investigating how these have change over a 30-year period. We find that Central and Eastern Europe can in many ways be split into “high immigrant countries” and “low immigration countries”. It also becomes clear that the “low immigration countries”, with the exception of Poland, have seen their immigrant populations increase considerably in relative terms during the last 30 years, and the response to this has been overwhelmingly hostile, with a sizable increase in anti-immigrant attitudes between 2008 and 2021. There is not a clear relationship between immigration and anti-immigrant attitudes within the “high-immigrant countries”, although there has been a general increase in anti-immigrant in the 30-year period explored.