Queen Bee Immigrant: The effects of status perceptions on immigration attitudes

Biljana Meiske

Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance

Abstract: This work studies the dynamics of inter-minority relations and attempts to uncover the influence of status position of the established immigrants on their attitudes towards new waves of immigration. I hypothesize that relative status deprivation, that is, the degree to which own in-group is ranked low in the ethnic status hierarchy of the host country, has a negative impact on group members’ attitudes toward an even lower ranked status group (such as refugees). In an online experiment (N=1,159), participants with migration background residing in Germany receive either a positive or a negative evaluation of their own ethnic/national in-group, as evaluated by a group of ethnic German participants, while keeping constant the evaluations of other immigrant groups. The results show that participants whose in-group received a negative evaluation are systematically less willing to donate to an organization supporting refugees. Furthermore, receiving negative evaluation impacts participants’ perceived descriptive norms regarding expression of non-acceptance of refugees (and other low-status out-groups) among majority population. Additionally, I study the role of indirect reciprocity as a possible moderator of observed treatment effects.

Keywords: Immigration attitudes; Discrimination; Status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 J15 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48
Date: 2022-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tax.mpg.de/RePEc/mpi/wpaper/TAX-MPG-RPS-2022-12.pdf Full text (original version) (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpi:wpaper:tax-mpg-rps-2022-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hans Mueller ().