Value Differences between Refugees and German Citizens: Insights from a Representative Survey
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | Lukas M. Fuchs,Yu Fan,Christian Scheve |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12795 |
Value Differences between Refugees and
German Citizens: Insights from a
Representative Survey
Lukas M. Fuchs*, Yu Fan* and Christian von Scheve*
ABSTRACT
The political debate over the inclusion of refugees frequently revolves around cultural differ-
ences, in particular differences pertaining to values, which are suspected to hamper social inte-
gration. Sociological accounts of values in principle warrant the assumption that different
values promote conflict over sensitive social issues. However, only little is known about the
actual values of refugees who recently arrived in many European countries. Comparative val-
ues research suggests that immigrants from culturally distant countries increase value hetero-
geneity. In contrast, acculturation and assimilation theories argue that values are not static
constructs, but subject to change and transformation. Using data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP
survey, a representative panel of refugees in Germany, and from the World Values Survey, the
present study investigates differences in liberal democratic and gender equality values between
refugees and German citizens. Results indicate that refugees from almost all countries investi-
gated show higher levels of agreement to these values, except secularism, than Germans.
INTRODUCTION
Since 2013, increasing numbers of refugees, predominantly from the Middle East and Northern
Africa, have stirred ongoing debate over immigration and integration policies in the European
Union. With about 1.4 million applications for asylum between 2013 and 2016, Germany admitted
the largest share of these applications in the European Union (UNHCR, 2018). The term ‘refugee’
in this debate is typically used as an umbrella term for ‘people who have been displaced from other
parts of the world and are fleeing from violence, war and terror’(BAMF, 2020) and who have filed
an asylum application.
1.
Since many applicants will stay in the European Union –Germany, for
example, having formally recognized 62 per cent of applicants in 2016 (BAMF, 2017) –develop-
ing tangible integration policies is a pressing matter. Such policies are critical for refugees and host
societies alike, as is evident in widespread resentment towards immigrants and the rise of right-
wing protest and voter turnout (M¨
uller-Hilmer & Gagn´
e, 2018).
A key issue in present debates over immigration and integration policies concerns the ideal of
shared values between refugees and native populations (Banulescu-Bogdan & Benton, 2017). In
particular, immigration from major origin countries perceived and labelled as ‘culturally distant’,
such as Syria (accounting for 36.9% of applications in 2016), Afghanistan (17.6%) or Iraq (13.3%)
* Freie Universit¨
at Berlin, Berlin, Germany
doi: 10.1111/imig.12795
©2020 The Authors. International Migration
published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf
of International Organization for Migration
International Migration Vol. 59 (5) 2021
ISSN 0020-7985
This is an open access article under the terms of the Crea
tive Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
(BAMF, 2017), is suspected to increase diversity of a population’s value orientations which, in
turn, is supposed to undermine the values deemed at the heart of a host society (Banulescu-Bogdan
& Benton, 2017). Many politicians and public commentators alike therefore demand that refugees
and immigrants learn about and embrace these values and that these values remain widely recog-
nized in society (ZEIT, 2018; Spiegel, 2018).
These debates can be misleading in at least two respects: First, they are largely void of empirical
evidence regarding actual differences in the value orientations of refugees and the domestic popula-
tion and regarding the consequences these differences might entail for immigrant inclusion. Instead,
increasing cultural diversity –which allegedly includes diversity of values –is blamed, in particular
by the political right, for the corrosion of the democratic polity, the subversion of gender equality
and the decline of the principles of the liberal state (Luce, 2017; Murray, 2017). Second, these
debates often underestimate within-country heterogeneity of values. From a cross-nationally com-
parative perspective, countries do indeed differ regarding their aggregate scores of certain values
measures, for example in the World Values Survey. But this cannot be taken as evidence for an
undisputed and well-defined set of values to which refugees could adhere to in the first place.
This is not to say, however, that these debates have no backing in sociological thought. Value con-
sensus theory in the tradition of Comte (1839) and Parsons (1968) holds that concurrence in values is
an essential precondition for social cohesion and lack thereof poses a danger to the social order
(Schwartz & Sagie, 2000). More recently, owing to this increasing interest in the role of values for
social cohesion (Schiefer & van der Noll, 2017, p. 590), the integration and acculturation literatures
alike started to recognize the role of values. Strang and Ager (2010), for example, explicitly recognize
the impact of shared values in their conceptual framework of integration. Several others have further
discussed the role of values in relation to social capital, communal bonds, or political participation and
other areas of societal integration (see Silver & Dowley, 2000; Laurence & Vaisse, 2006). Likewise,
the consolidation of personal and public values is increasingly acknowledged as key factor for individ-
ual-level acculturation processes (Schwartz et al., 2010) and well-being (Bobowik et al., 2011).
The lack of evidence regarding how values between refugees arriving in Germany since 2013 and
the German population actually differ poses an obstacle to assessing societal challenges and tailoring
policies of integration and immigration. In the following, unless defined otherwise with regard to our
specific sample, we refer to all people who are in Germany under some sort of legal protection in Ger-
many (recognized asylum claim, refugee status, subsidiary protection, exceptional leave to remain or
ongoing refugee status determination procedure) and will thus stay in Germany in middle- or long-run
as ‘refugees’. Drawing on unique data from a large-scale prospective panel study on refugees in Ger-
many and data from the World Values Survey, the present study therefore investigates whether the
adherence to liberal democratic, secular and gender equality values, differs between refugees who
have recently arrived in Germany and a representative sample of the German population. Controlling
for a range of factors known to affect value orientations, such as gender, age, education, income and
religious orientation, we rule out that potential differences in value orientations are due to these fac-
tors, making it more likely that differences can be attributed to (unobserved) cultural differences,
nationality, country of origin, or specific refugee experiences. In the following, we first review exist-
ing theory and evidence on the cultural consequences of immigration, cross-cultural differences in val-
ues, and the role of values for social integration. We then describe the data and methods we used,
report results from a series of logistic and Poisson regressions, and discuss our findings.
CULTURE, VALUES AND IMMIGRATION
Concerns regarding the deterioration of important values as a consequence of immigration and
increasing cultural diversity often rest on the assumption that actors are ‘carriers’of culture, i.e.
60 Fuchs et al.
©2020 The Authors. International Migration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of
International Organization for Migration
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