Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00716.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00716.x
Immigration and the Imagined Community
in Europe and the United States
Jack Citrin
John Sides
University of California
George Washington University
Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration
posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion
about immigrants and immigration.We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but
we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their
countries and tend to favor lower levels of immigration. The underpinnings of individual attitudes are
similar in all countries and immigration attitudes are surprisingly unrelated to country-level differences
in GDP, unemployment and the number and composition of the foreign born. An implication of these
findings is that acceptance of higher levels of immigration, deemed by many to be an economic need, will
require both more selective immigration policies and an emphasis on the cultural assimilation of
newcomers.
Immigration brings strangers into ‘our’ homeland, complicating the balance
between unity and diversity. In the United States, repeated waves of immigration
over two centuries have created a remarkably diverse society, with significant
groups coming from nearly every continent.Who should be allowed to come to
America, how many, and what should be expected of them once in the United
States are old, though enduring, political issues. E pluribus unum remains the
national motto even as debates about its feasibility intensify. A striking aspect of
contemporary immigration, however, is that it is affecting not only ‘settler
societies’ such as the United States, Canada and Australia, but also many other
countries whose sense of identity has been far less inclusive and whose boundaries
have been less porous, at least until now. In particular, many European countries
are confronting the challenges of ethnic relations and social cohesion associated
with the arrival and settlement of large numbers of culturally, religiously and
racially different people. This article uses the European Social Survey (ESS) and
the ‘Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy’ (CID) study to compare what citizens
on both sides of the Atlantic think about immigration. Has American history
produced a distinctive set of attitudes toward immigration, a relatively welcoming
outlook that forms part of an ‘exceptional’ political culture? Or do Western
publics on both sides of the Atlantic converge in their opinions, notwithstanding
the differences in their countries’ past experience and policy? And what factors
explain any cross-national differences in attitudes? For example, does the degree
of concern about immigration within a country derive from its economic health,
or the size and composition of its own immigrant population?
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
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J AC K C I T R I N A N D J O H N S I D E S
Immigrants in the Narratives of Nationhood
The comparison of popular attitudes is intriguing because America and Europe
approach the dilemmas of contemporary immigration from radically different
historical perspectives. Immigration is a fundamental part of America’s founding
myth. The repeated proclamation by presidents and lesser politicians that ‘we are
a nation of immigrants’ elicits virtually no rhetorical dissent. Most Americans
acknowledge that all of us ‘here’ now – Native Americans aside – originated from
somewhere over ‘there’. Indeed, immigrants are often portrayed as ‘foreigner-
founders’, the quintessential Americans, adherents of the values of personal
responsibility and hard work that are distinctive of American political culture and
symbols of an optimistic ‘new’ nation constantly renewing its consent-based,
individualist identity through the arrival of people leaving their past behind (see
Honig, 2001). Although the historical reality is that legal immigration to the
United States often was difficult and that immigration policy before the 1960s
was founded on ethnic prejudice, the welcoming figure of the Statue of Liberty,
and Ellis Island, the landing place for ‘the huddled masses yearning to be free’, are
symbols of American national identity as potent as Plymouth Rock and
Jamestown.
In Europe, the story is quite different. Immigration does not figure in the
construction of identities of most nation states in the ever-expanding European
Union; instead, these states define themselves in bounded ethnic terms. The
demographic fact may be that Germany has a large foreign-born population, but
the often-mocked official position that ‘Germany is not a country of immigra-
tion’ is broadly accurate in describing how ethnic minorities, even if born in
Germany, fit into the political community (Hansen, 2007). Unlike the American
experience, immigration came to the nations of Western Europe more recently
and reactively, first as a response to the consequences of the Second World
War and then as a result of the political convulsions in Eastern Europe, the Middle
East and elsewhere.
In Europe, early post-Second World War immigration was a market-driven
economy, with ‘guest workers’ and residents of former colonies recruited to fill
the need for labor. After the oil shock of the mid-1970s, European countries
reversed course and pursued zero-immigration policies while also attempting to
reduce their foreign-born populations through forced and voluntary return
(Parsons and Smeeding, 2006). In the late 1990s, however, shortages of skilled
labor created in part by competition with the booming American economy led
European countries to shift from stemming immigration to selective solicitation
of high-tech and professional workers. Demographic considerations also
prompted a more positive orientation toward immigration. Birth rates below
replacement levels and increased longevity mean that there is a potential shortfall
in the resources required to fund politically entrenched entitlement programs.
Immigration arguably could mitigate the consequences of declining populations,
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2008, 56(1)
I M M I G R AT I O N A N D T H E I M AG I N E D C O M M U N I T Y
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but ironically the more inclusive and generous benefits programs in Europe seem
to have impeded the economic integration of these immigrants relative to the
United States and Canada (Hansen, 2007).
In both the United States and Europe, the debate about immigration – who
should be allowed to come and how many – has two distinct primary dimen-
sions, the economic and the cultural. On the economic side, there is a highly
technical debate about the consequences of immigration for employment, wage
levels and public finance. In the United States, reviews of recent evidence
(Altonji and Card, 1992; Borjas, 2003; Brimelow, 2007; Camorata, 2007) con-
clude that there is a small macroeconomic benefit of immigration, but that this
is accompanied by adverse impacts on the employment and wage levels of
native workers.
Concerns about the cultural consequences of immigration have a long ancestry.
From the 1840s on, nativist resistance to immigration in the United States rested
on claims that the newcomers, particularly those differing from previous immi-
grants, would not or could not assimilate to America’s democratic values. Most
recently and trenchantly, Samuel Huntington (2004) has worried that the large
and ongoing influx of immigrants from Mexico poses a threat to America’s
linguistic and cultural identity. Although future trends may differ, the available
evidence to date suggests that by the third generation, the vast majority of
Hispanic immigrants are monolingual in English, identify as Americans rather
than as members of their country of origin and express patriotic sentiments as
strongly as non-Hispanic whites (Citrin et al., 2007).
In Europe, similar concerns about the linguistic and political integration of
immigrants have grown and policy has taken another restrictionist turn. Indeed,
the greater cultural distance between immigrants and native populations in
Europe arguably makes the ideal of national solidarity based on shared values
harder to achieve. Since 1990, many immigrants to Europe have been Muslims
whose values are thought by many native citizens to conflict with the norms of
a liberal, secular democratic state (Hansen, 2007). This sense of cultural threat,
fueled by terrorist attacks in Britain and Spain and by the murder of Theo van
Gogh in the Netherlands, has swung the policy pendulum from multiculturalism
to assimilation. The celebration of diversity has given way to support for language
tests and knowledge of national history and cultural norms as conditions of
immigration and naturalization.
The delicate balance between economic need and cultural threat makes immi-
gration policy a highly sensitive political issue. Nathan Glazer (2007) has noted
the pervasive disjunction between American public opinion, which tends to favor
less immigration and more restricted access to government benefits, and the
balance of political forces that has allowed an alliance of business groups and
ethnic minorities to sustain policies that generally mean more immigrants. In
Europe too, the public is more opposed to immigration than the political
© 2008 The Authors. Journal...
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