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Anti-immigrant sentiment in host countries: a cross-national study of Europe, Turkey and the United States
Date
2025
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on the dynamics of immigration controls and hostility towards immigrants, as the issue has become central in the politics of many immigrant host countries in Global North and Global South countries. This dissertation aims to respond to two major questions: 1- What are the circumstances under which an anti-immigrant environment prevails in immigrant-host countries. 2- Under which conditions and among whom do anti-immigrant attitudes and policies attain more support. Combining insights from party politics, crisis politics and public opinion literature, the dissertation builds a theory of change in anti-immigrant sentiment and tests it in the cross-national Europe, Turkey and the U.S. data focusing on the shifts in party positions via analyses of manifesto texts and the shifts in public opinion via analyses of the survey data. The dissertation contributes to the flourishing literature on immigration politics and public opinion that explore the causes behind increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in countries previously known as endorsers of relatively liberal immigration policies. The in-depth exploration of the shifts in the immigration politics and public opinion in two large-scale immigration countries (i.e. the U.S. and Turkey), provides valuable case-driven insights to the discussions on the advent of immigration politics in host states, presenting the effects of increasing salience and politicization of immigration along with crises in two countries one from the Global North and the other from the Global South. ☐ The dissertation mainly focuses on the political drivers of immigration hostility, an aspect understudied in the public opinion on immigration literature. Positioning itself among the elite-driven studies in public opinion, I present that the right-wing populist parties, which are often depicted as the reflectors of the previously ignored public backlash against immigrants, are far from being mere representers of the “anti-immigrant public,” instead, they actively cultivate immigration hostility with their framings of immigration as crisis, creating scapegoating narratives that connect the pressing problems in the country to immigrants, induce anxieties and threat perceptions around immigration. My theory provides an explanation for increase in anti-immigrant sentiment where political factors play a primary role. The immigration hostility is constructed and bolstered by the elite cues, boosting threat perceptions and shifting norms around exclusion of immigrants, but also showing its interaction with the structural factors. I argue that elite rhetoric may not always have the same effect across all contexts, instead, several factors such as crises and political polarization may increase the power of the elite framing, making public more susceptible to it. The supportive evidence from the textual data from Turkish and the U.S. contexts presents that anti-immigrant actors play a leading role in the elections and crisis contexts increase the success of anti-immigrant elite appeals by facilitating the mainstream party accommodation. ☐ Another feature of my theory of change in anti-immigrant sentiment is that it assumes a dynamicity of the public opinion in relation to the shifts in the political and economic contextual factors, as opposed to studies that suggest the stability of immigration attitudes. I argue that while stability arguments may hold under many contexts, the constellation of three factors in a country facilitates changes in the anti-immigrant environment and the change is mediated by the shifts in the mainstream party positions. The two permissive conditions facilitating the shift in the immigration stance of the mainstream party in a country are the combined presence of a crisis and an anti-immigrant actor which increase the propensity of the mainstream party’s accommodation of the anti-immigrant actors in its election campaigns, as happened both in Turkey and the U.S. in 2023 and 2024 elections. Analyzing textual data and public opinion survey data, I present that, as has been in the case of the Turkey and the U.S., political parties may change their immigration stance, social acceptance of immigrants may recess and the support for restrictive immigration policy may increase in a country when contextual conditions significantly fluctuate and the two permissive conditions constellate. In addition to the role of contextual factors, in line with the previous works on threat perceptions, I argue that, at the individual level, feelings of economic insecurity and sociotropic pessimism about the economy, authoritarian personality, stronger in-group identity will be positively related to anti-immigrant attitudes. I argue that the role of political ideology and partisan identity will be context dependent, closely tied to the changing party positions on immigration. ☐ My research then develops a generalizable analytical framework to comprehensively identify the drivers of outgroup hostility in different national contexts and further theorizes the relationship between the structural conditions, party politics, and immigration attitudes. ☐ I tested my theory using regression analyses of cross-national survey data and salience and sentiment analyses of party manifesto data. My cross-national analysis of Europe utilizes the European Social Survey data along with the secondary data obtained from the quantitative text analysis of party positions on immigration in Europe. I use my two case studies, Turkey and the United States, to present how economic and political conditions contribute to the prevalence of anti-immigrant hostility. For my case studies, I rely on both survey data and text data, utilizing publicly available public opinion surveys, original public opinion survey data, and corpora of election manifestos of political parties scraped from the Manifesto Project and American Presidency Project. ☐ The chapter on Turkey focuses on the years from 2011 to the 2023 elections. It examines the ascendance of immigrant hostility in the country along with the cost-of-living crisis and anti-immigrant political actors, facilitating the shift in the positions of pro-immigrant political parties. The text analysis of manifesto documents shows the increasingly negative sentiment on immigration and immigrants in the discourse of mainstream political parties in the recent elections, and the analysis of survey data presents that anti-immigrant attitudes are not a marginal phenomenon attributed to far-right, nativist political actors in Turkey, but rather dominate public opinion in the country. Consistent with the predictions on the role of economic precarity, the original post-election 2023 survey data analysis reveals the significant positive effect of economic insecurity across all measures of negative attitudes towards immigrants and immigration and shows the conditional effects of political ideology and partisan identity. ☐ The chapter on the United States analyzes election manifestos and survey data from 2000 to the present, tracing the salience and tone of immigration in Democrats' and Republicans' election statements. While the text data reveals the trajectory of the political rhetoric on immigration, the surveys unravel the trends in public opinion on immigration. In addition to original survey data in 2019 that assesses the public support for increasing spending for combatting illegal immigration, the study utilizes the American National Election Survey data from 1988 to 2024. The analyses show that while Trump's initial term induced liberalization of immigration attitude among Democrats, another change happened during 2024 elections with the shift in the Democratic Party's election campaign. The findings indicate a weakening polarization, in immigration policy preferences among partisans as opposed to the broader trends in partisan polarization in 2024. ☐ The findings from each study discussed in the dissertation provide supportive evidence on the elite’s significant role in affecting the policy preferences of the public. The dissertation shows that the political parties may strategically decide to take a polarizing stance on a policy issue and based on changing strategic benefits, may choose to accommodate other parties in another election year and the changes in party positions will have repercussions in the public. Overall, this study aims to fill a gap in the literature, focusing on the understudied role of contextual political factors in the prevalence of anti-immigrant hostility and connect the findings from the disparate set of works on party politics, crisis politics and public opinion. ☐ Keywords: Public Opinion, Immigration, Party politics, Crisis, Insecurity, Threat Perceptions, Social Norms, Partisanship, Right-Wing Populism, Perceptions, Europe, Turkey, the United States, Manifesto Data, Text Analysis, Survey Analysis
Description
"At the request of the author or degree granting institution, this graduate work is not available to view or purchase until August 13 2026."--ProQuest abstract /details page.
Keywords
Immigration, Party politics, Public opinion, Turkey, United States, Europe