A tale of two logics: how solidarity and threat perceptions shape immigrant attitudes towards immigration in Western Europe

Abstract Scholars have paid considerable attention to the attitudes of host societies towards immigration. However, relatively little is known about whether and under which conditions immigrants themselves support immigration more or less than those without a migration background. This study argues that immigrant attitudes towards immigration are motivated by two competing logics, solidarity and threat, with each logic being activated under different circumstances. Specifically, the relative strength of the two logics depends on factors relating to (1) the immigrants themselves (e.g. how long they have been living in their host country), (2) the type of immigration in question (i.e. characteristics of the prospective immigrants) and (3) certain conditions in the host country (particularly the presence or absence of discrimination and assimilation pressure). Evidence from the European Social Survey in 15 West European countries over a period of 18 years (2002–2019) supports these theoretical expectations.

contemporary immigration countries, including all of Western Europe, where long histories of population movements have resulted in an increasing number of individuals with foreign roots (Castles and Miller 2014;Foner and Bertossi 2011). 1 As a result, we know relatively little about whether immigrants support immigration more or less than majority group members do, whether some immigrant groups are more accepting of newcomers than others, and what affects the immigration attitudes of immigrants.
Our study intends to fill this gap in the existing literature by addressing the questions how immigrants view immigration, and under what conditions these views become more positive or negative. 2To do so, we draw on two competing theoretical perspectives, the minority solidarity thesis and intergroup threat theory, to derive predictions about the formation of immigration attitudes among immigrants in Western Europe.While the minority solidarity thesis posits that immigrants are more supportive of immigration than individuals without a migration background due to shared experiences, intergroup threat theory predicts that immigrants are more critical of immigration since they perceive newcomers as a potential threat to their already precarious material and symbolic status.We argue that these theoretical perspectives should be understood as distinct logics, with each logic becoming more or less prominent depending on certain situational factors (Meeusen et al. 2019).In other words, we posit that solidarity and threat are two ends of an attitudinal spectrum, and certain factors can move the needle towards one end or the other.These factors fall into three categories: (1) those that pertain to the immigrants themselves, (2) those that relate to the immigration that may or may not be supported and (3) those that characterise the host country environment.
As for the first category, the minority solidarity thesis suggests that the solidarity logic becomes stronger the more a particular immigrant can relate to the specific experiences of prospective immigrants.Based on this insight, we argue that first-generation immigrants should be more supportive of immigration than second-generation immigrants, as they went through the immigration process themselves and thus have more in common with prospective immigrants.In addition, we expect that first-generation immigrants become less supportive of immigration the longer they have been living in the host country, as they become more removed from their own migration experience.Regarding the second category, intergroup threat theory suggests that the threat logic becomes stronger the more a particular immigrant perceives prospective immigrants as a cultural or economic threat.Therefore, we posit that immigrants' support for immigration diminishes as the perceived cultural distance between them and prospective immigrants increases, and as it becomes more likely that prospective immigrants will use welfare resources.As for the last category, we argue that the experience of personal discrimination amplifies feelings of solidarity and kinship, while assimilation pressure exerted by the government decreases them.
We test our arguments by analysing nearly 200,000 responses to the European Social Survey collected in 15 West European countries between 2002 and 2019.The results of this analysis suggest that overall, the solidarity logic trumps the threat logic, as immigrants are significantly more supportive of immigration than those without a migration background.In accordance with our theoretical expectations, the findings further suggest that first-generation immigrants are more supportive of immigration than second-generation immigrants, but their level of support decreases the longer they have been living in their current country of residence.Moreover, in support of our hypotheses, we find that white immigrants are more supportive of immigration than non-white immigrants if the prospective immigrants are described as white, but less supportive if they are described as non-white or as being from a poor country outside of Europe.Lastly, in accordance with our theoretical expectations, immigrants who report having experienced discrimination are more supportive of immigration than those who do not, and immigrants in countries with high assimilation pressure are less supportive of immigration than those in countries where such pressure is low.
Our article makes several contributions.First, our findings have important implications for the study of immigration attitudes and their determinants, as they suggest that immigrants' views on immigration are markedly different from those of individuals without migration background.Even within the migrant community, there are significant differences in levels of support for immigration (first-vs.second-generation; length of stay; country of origin).Future studies on this topic are therefore well-advised to pay attention to the demographic complexities of migration countries.Second, we contribute to theoretical debates within the literature on inter-minority relations, as our findings provide important insights into the conditions under which the solidarity logic trumps the threat logic and vice versa.Third, by showing that length of residency, cultural dissimilarity and assimilation pressure reduce support for immigration among immigrants, our results cast doubt on the assumption that greater diversity will inevitably lead to European societies becoming more welcoming to immigrants, particularly those from outside of Europe.In that sense, the freedom of movement at the core of the European project may be less of a cosmopolitanising force than previously understood.Fourth, assuming that attitudes have behavioural consequences, our study is relevant to those interested in immigrants' social and political behaviour, such as voting decisions and support for political parties.
The remainder of this article proceeds as follows.First, we draw on the minority solidarity thesis and intergroup threat theory to develop our conceptual framework on immigrant attitudes towards immigration.From this framework, eight testable hypotheses are derived.Second, we elaborate on the measures of the European Social Survey used for our analyses as well as the results of these analyses.These results are subjected to a wide range of robustness checks.Lastly, a concluding section summarises this article's main findings, discusses their implications for scholarship and practice as well as their limitations, and indicates possible directions for future research on the subject.

Two competing logics: solidarity and threat
Broadly, this article is concerned with the determinants of public attitudes towards immigration, that is, individuals' views on the extent to which certain immigrants should be allowed to enter and remain in the country (Davidov et al. 2014;Ward and Masgoret 2008).The literature on the subject has produced a range of important insights into the immigration attitudes of host societies and the drivers thereof (Ceobanu and Escandell 2010;Davidov and Semyonov 2017;Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014;Karreth et al. 2015).However, one important factor that is often ignored is individuals' migration background, as previous studies rarely distinguish between the immigration attitudes of individuals with and without migration background.If at all considered, migration background is usually relegated to the status of a control variable (Alarian and Neureiter 2021;Mayda 2006;Neureiter 2022), meaning it is not explicitly theorised and does not feature prominently in the empirical analysis (see Just and Anderson (2015) for a notable exception).Given the rising number of individuals with a migration background in much of the developed world (Maxwell 2016;Schneider and Heath 2020), it appears pertinent to systematically analyse the immigration attitudes of immigrants.We provide such an analysis by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework on immigrant attitudes towards immigration in Western Europe.In developing this framework, we draw on two competing theoretical perspectives, the minority solidarity thesis and intergroup threat theory.
As for the former, the minority solidarity thesis suggests that the average immigrant views immigration more positively than the average individual without migration background (Berry and Kalin 1995;Festinger 1957;Just and Anderson 2015).According to this theoretical perspective, individuals with a migration background identify with prospective immigrants, as they themselves (and/or someone close to them) have gone through the same process of immigration.Immigrants also share additional experiences and problems with prospective immigrants, including socioeconomic disadvantages, insufficient representation in politics and the media, and the recurring feeling of being an outsider in one's own society (Cortland et al. 2017;Craig and Richeson 2016).These shared experiences foster a sense of empathy, kinship, and solidarity that transcends the boundaries of one's ingroup and extends to prospective immigrants (Glasford and Calcagno 2012;Sirin et al. 2017).Therefore, immigrants -particularly those who recently went through the immigration process -should be more supportive of immigration than individuals without a migration background, as they view prospective immigrants as part of a common ingroup rather than as constituting a separate outgroup (Just and Anderson 2015;Subašić et al. 2011).
H1: Immigrants have more positive attitudes toward immigration than individuals without a migration background.
A competing theoretical perspective is provided by intergroup threat theory, which posits that one social group's attitudes towards another are a function of the extent to which the former group perceives the latter as a threat (Neureiter 2022).Such threat perceptions manifest themselves in two different forms: cultural and economic (Ben-Nun Bloom et al. 2015;Fetzer 2000).As for the former, cultural threats are defined as concerns about intangible constructs such as group esteem, value systems, and social institutions (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014;Neureiter 2022).Applied to the context of our study, cultural threat models suggest that immigrants may perceive prospective immigrants as a danger to their language, customs, and values, especially those that are culturally distant or growing in relative size (Fouka and Tabellini 2021).In other words, members of a particular immigrant group fear that their own cultural cohesiveness and status may be undermined by the increased influence of and contact with other immigrants.This theoretical perspective is consistent with the results of recent studies which suggest that ethnic minorities exhibit more negative attitudes towards culturally distant groups than towards more similar ones (Hindriks et al. 2014;Meeusen et al. 2019).
Economic threats are defined as 'concerns about the availability and relative distribution of tangible resources such as money, housing, or jobs' (Neureiter 2022(Neureiter : 1044)).Applied to the context of our study, economic threat models indicate that immigrant attitudes towards immigration are in large part a function of the extent to which the latter are viewed as competitors over scarce material resources (Ben-Nun Bloom et al. 2015;Cavaille and Ferwerda 2022;Lu 2020).Given that immigrants tend to have low socioeconomic status relative to the rest of the population, they are in competition with prospective immigrants over manual labour jobs as well as welfare resources such as government housing programs, free/subsidized healthcare, and cash assistance (Collier 2013: 114-16).In sum, then, intergroup threat theory predicts that immigrants should be less supportive of immigration than individuals without a migration background, as prospective immigrants are likely viewed as a danger to the ingroup's symbolic status and economic standing.
H2: Immigrants have more negative attitudes toward immigration than individuals without a migration background.

When solidarity trumps threat (and vice versa)
Solidarity and threat should not be understood as mutually exclusive in the sense that one logic continually and completely crowds out the other.Rather, the two logics represent ends of an attitudinal spectrum, and immigrants fall somewhere on this spectrum depending on certain situational factors at a given point in time.Based on our theoretical arguments outlined above and previous research findings, we identify six pivotal drivers of immigrant attitudes towards immigration: personal immigration experience and its recency, cultural (dis-)similarity and the likely use of welfare resources, as well as personal discrimination and assimilation pressures.While we do not claim that these are the only drivers that matter in this context, our framework rooted in intergroup threat theory and the minority solidarity thesis suggests that the six factors we elaborate on in this section are important determinants of immigration attitudes among immigrants.Conceptually, these factors fall into three categories: (1) those that pertain to the immigrants themselves, (2) those that relate to the immigration that may or may not be supported and (3) those that characterise the host country environment.
As for the first category, the minority solidarity thesis suggests that immigrants' level of support for immigration is in large part a function of the extent to which they share experiences with prospective immigrants, as such shared experiences translate into empathy, kinship, and solidarity (Just and Anderson 2015).From this, it follows that immigrants who identify more with the anticipated or perceived experiences of prospective immigrants will be more supportive of immigration.Research has shown that among the formative experiences of immigrants, the process of immigration itself (i.e.leaving one's country of origin and entering, settling, and adjusting to life in another country) plays a particularly important role (Akhtar 1995;Andreouli and Howarth 2013).
Therefore, we posit that immigrants who personally and recently went through the immigration process will feel more solidarity with prospective immigrants and, as a result, be more supportive of immigration.Specifically, this means that we expect first-generation migrants to be more supportive of immigration than second-generation migrants, since the latter have not personally gone through the immigration process.We also expect first-generation migrants with a more recent history of immigration to have more positive immigration attitudes than first-generation migrants who have been living in the host country for a relatively long time, as the latter have become more removed from their immigration experience.
H3: First-generation immigrants have more positive attitudes toward immigration than second-generation immigrants.
H4: The longer a first-generation immigrant has lived in their host country, the more negative their attitudes toward immigration become.
In addition to these factors pertaining to the immigrants themselves, the relative strength of the two logics is also determined by factors that relate to the immigration in question.According to intergroup threat theory, immigrants will exhibit more negative attitudes towards immigration if they perceive prospective immigrants as a cultural and/or economic threat.Previous research on threat perceptions has shown that prospective immigrants that are culturally distant (in terms of language, race, religion, etc.) tend to be perceived as a cultural threat (Fasel et al. 2013;Malhotra et al. 2013), while prospective immigrants that are likely to use welfare resources -particularly asylum seekers and refugees -are often viewed as an economic threat (Bansak et al. 2016;Hercowitz-Amir et al. 2017).Based on these insights, we argue that immigrants are more supportive of immigration if the prospective immigrants are culturally similar to them (i.e. if prospective immigrants are perceived as sharing the same race/ethnicity as their country of origin).In addition, we posit that immigrants exhibit more negative attitudes towards immigration if the prospective immigrants are viewed as likely welfare recipients.Since whites, including white immigrants, often associate immigrants from outside of the Western hemisphere with poverty and being a fiscal burden (Blinder 2015;Lundström 2017), we expect white immigrants to exhibit more negative attitudes towards immigration from peripheral countries than from Europe or North America.
H5: Immigrants have more positive attitudes toward immigration from culturally similar countries than from culturally distant countries.H6: White immigrants have more negative attitudes toward immigration from poorer countries than from richer countries.
A last category of factors influencing immigrants' position between solidarity and threat are those that characterise the host country environment.Within the host country environment, two factors appear to be particularly important: personal discrimination and assimilation pressure.By personal discrimination, we mean interactions between private actors involving unfair or unequal treatment based on group characteristics (Stevens and Thijs 2018;Verkuyten et al. 2019).In other words, personal discrimination describes experiences of group-based disrespect that occur in everyday interactions between individuals.Since most cases of personal discrimination against immigrants are committed by individuals without a migration background (Alanya et al. 2017;Pettigrew 1998), such unfair treatment in daily life leads immigrants to emotionally disconnect from the majority population (i.e.white, native-born Europeans) while simultaneously activating perceptions of communality and empathy with other oppressed or disadvantaged groups, such as prospective immigrants (Maliepaard and Verkuyten 2018;Meeusen et al. 2019).In other words, discrimination amplifies the kinship effect posited by the minority solidarity thesis.Thus, we expect immigrants who experience personal discrimination to develop more positive attitudes towards immigration relative to immigrants who do not.H7: Immigrants who experience personal discrimination have more positive attitudes toward immigration than those who do not.
Unlike personal discrimination, assimilation pressure does not originate from individual sources but rather from institutional arrangements.More specifically, assimilation pressure describes an environment in which government actions, rhetoric, and/or policies compel immigrants to fully adopt the rules and values of the majority population, at the expense of their own cultural norms and practices (Barou 2014;Dimitrova et al. 2013).As such, assimilation pressure differs from personal discrimination in several important ways, as it tends to be constant and comprehensive rather than sporadic and isolated.Importantly, since assimilation pressure is institution-based, it is 'faceless' in that it lacks a clearly identifiable perpetrator and cannot be easily attributed to a certain social group (Verkuyten 2010).Since assimilation pressure is faceless, the feeling of group-based disrespect stemming from assimilation pressure cannot be easily attributed to the majority population, which inhibits perceptions of communality and empathy with other oppressed or disadvantaged groups, and instead elicits a defensive reaction in the form of inter-minority bias (Cortland et al. 2017).In other words, immigrants who feel devalued by assimilation pressure may attempt to restore a positive social identity and lift their group-esteem by devaluing other vulnerable groups, such as prospective immigrants (Brylka et al. 2016;Meeusen et al. 2019).
In addition, assimilation pressure is intended to alter the attitudes and behaviours of targeted immigrants such that they conform more closely to those of the majority population.A prime example for such assimilation pressure are the language and civic education requirements designed to integrate migrants that have recently been introduced in several West European countries (Neureiter 2019).These requirements include mandatory integration courses, contracts, and tests with the goal of promoting 'basic knowledge of the host society's language, history, and institutions' and 'respect for the basic values of the EU' (Mulcahy 2011: 34).The explicit purpose of these mandatory integration requirements is to render immigrants close to or indistinguishable from the host population in terms of attitudes and behaviour (Banulescu-Bogdan and Benton 2017; Neureiter 2019), which conceivably also includes attitudes towards immigration.As a result, integration requirements should, over time, make the immigration attitudes of immigrants more like those of the majority group.To be sure, we do not posit that assimilation pressure affects all immigrants equally and uniformly conditions their attitudes and behaviour to become more similar to those of the host population, as research has shown that assimilation pressure can produce heterogeneous effects and even lead to backlash (Drouhot and Nee 2019).We simply argue that overall, assimilation pressure -particularly in the form of integration requirements -changes immigrants' attitudes, including their attitudes towards immigration, in the direction of the host society.For these reasons, we expect immigrants in countries with high assimilation pressure to exhibit more negative attitudes towards immigration.
H8: Immigrants in countries with strong assimilation pressure have more negative attitudes toward immigration than those in countries where such pressure is weak.

Data and measures
In order to test our hypotheses, we use data provided by the European Social Survey (ESS), which is an ideal data source for our purposes as it offers a representative, probability-based sample of denizens across multiple European countries over time.Given our theoretical focus on established democracies as well as issues with data availability, we limit our analyses to the EU-15 countries between 2002 and 2019. 3Our main sample consists of a total of 228,727 respondents and is comprised of both immigrants and individuals without a migration background.To measure our dependent variable, attitudes towards immigration, we use three separate variables.Specifically, ESS respondents assess the extent to which individuals of (A) the same race or ethnic group as the majority population, (B) a race or ethnic group different from the majority population and (C) a poor country outside of Europe should be allowed to migrate to their country.We code responses to correspond with positive immigration attitudes, ranging from allow many to come and live here (4), allow some (3), allow a few (2), to allow none (1).
Our primary independent variable, migration background, is measured via a binary variable coded 1 if a respondent or at least one of their parents was born outside of their current country of residence, and 0 otherwise.We also include two moderating variables in some of our models, personal discrimination and assimilation pressure.Personal discrimination is captured by taking the average of five binary variables, each coded 1 if a respondent indicates they were discriminated against due to their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and language.Our second moderator, assimilation pressure, is measured via the Civic Integration Policy Index (CIVIX) (Goodman 2010).This index 'captures the extent to which countries provide (or demand) acculturation programmes for immigrants such as language training and civic education.More specifically, CIVIX looks at language and civic education requirements across the three different stages of the immigration process (entry, settlement and citizenship) and assigns points according to the restrictiveness of the requirements at each stage.The composite index ranges from 0 to 9 (scored in quarter-point increments), with higher values representing stricter integration requirements' (Neureiter 2019(Neureiter : 2785). 4 To test H4, H5 and H6, we restrict our analyses to a subset of the respondents, namely first-generation migrants.This is necessitated by the fact that the hypothesised independent variables -immigrants' duration of residence and ethnic background -are only available for this particular subset of ESS respondents.To measure duration of residence, we use a five-point ordinal variable indicating how long ago a first-generation migrant came to live in their current host country; it ranges from less than 1 year (1), 1 to 5 years (2), 6 to 10 years (3), 11 to 20 years (4), to more than 20 years (5).We capture ethnic background via a proxy dummy variable that is coded 1 if the respondent migrated from a majority white country of origin (i.e.North America, West Europe, East Europe, Australia and New Zealand), and 0 otherwise.
We control for several other drivers of immigration attitudes.First, we account for respondents' gender by including a binary variable in our models that is coded 1 if a respondent indicated they are male, and 0 otherwise.Second, age is measured via a count variable capturing the number of years since a respondent was born.Third, education is captured by a 5-point ordinal scale ranging from 'less than lower secondary education' to 'tertiary education completed' .Fourth, since the ESS does not include an objective income measure that is consistently applied across all nine waves, we use respondents' subjective financial well-being as a proxy; subjective financial well-being is captured via a four-point ordinal scale that ranges from 'very difficult to get by on present income' to 'living comfortably on present income' .Lastly, to measure political ideology, we use respondents' self-placement on a scale ranging from 0 to 10, with higher values representing a more conservative ideology.

Results
Table 1 illustrates the descriptive statistics for the 228,727 sample respondents.The mean values for the three dependent variables range between x -= 2.5 and x -= 2.8, meaning that on average, respondents want to allow between a few and some immigrant to enter their country.It seems noteworthy that the mean value is highest for the survey item asking respondents about prospective migrants of the same race or ethnicity as the majority population, which indicates that racial preferences and animosity play an important role in shaping immigration attitudes.Roughly 16% of sample respondents have a migration background, meaning that either they themselves or at least one of their parents were born outside of their current country of residence.The mean value for our discrimination index is quite low (x -= 0.01), which indicates that only few respondents report having experienced discrimination due to their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and/or language. 5The average CIVIX score is somewhat low (x -= 3.189), meaning that the sample countries exerted moderately strong assimilation pressures on their migrant communities during the time period under investigation.Roughly 47% of sample respondents identify as male.The average sample respondent is 49 years old, has completed upper secondary education, lives comfortably on their present income, and is politically moderate.Next, we turn to our hypothesis tests.Given the ordinal nature of our dependent variables, we estimate our models using ordered probit with country-fixed effects, year dummies, and robust standard errors clustered by country-year to account for any heteroskedasticity of observation (Beck et al. 1998).Additionally, all analyses are conducted using the ESS post-stratification and population size weights in order to maximise the representativeness of the sample and increase the precision of the regression estimates (Angrist and Pischke 2015: 201-3).The results for the main models, shown in Table 2, suggest that across all three dependent variables, immigrants exhibit significantly greater support for immigration than respondents without a migration background.Therefore, H1 is supported while H2 receives no support, which means that overall, the solidarity logic trumps the threat logic.
In order to test H3, we split our binary indicator of immigration background into two separate dummy variables, one for first-generation migrants (coded 1 if a respondent was born outside their current country of residence, and 0 otherwise) and one for second-generation migrants (coded 1 if a respondent was born inside their current country of residence but at least one of their parents was born outside of it).The two variables have mean values of x -= 0.096 and x -= 0.065, respectively, meaning that 9.6% of sample respondents are first-generation migrants while 6.5% are second-generation migrants.As Table 2 shows, the coefficients for the two variables are positive and significant, indicating that both first-generation migrants and second-generation migrants have more positive attitudes towards immigration than individuals without a migration background.Interestingly, the coefficient for the first-generation dummy is much larger than that for the second-generation dummy.We find that this difference in effect size is statistically significant. 6This means that while second-generation migrants are more supportive of immigration than individuals without a migration background, they are less supportive of it than first-generation migrants.Therefore, H3 is supported.
The results pertaining to the control variables are largely as expected.Older respondents and those with a conservative ideology are less in favour of admitting prospective migrants, while having a higher education and income increases support for admission.Interestingly, while males have more positive attitudes towards prospective migrants from the same race or ethnicity as the majority population as well as those from a different race or ethnicity, they exhibit less favourable attitudes towards prospective migrants from poor countries.This could be due to the word 'poor' triggering perceptions of migrants as an economic threat (i.e. a welfare drain) in male respondents, suggesting that men are more prone to economic threat perceptions than women.
As stated in the previous section, we test H4, H5 and H6 by restricting our analyses to first-generation migrants.The results for these sub-sample analyses, shown in Table 3, indicate that the duration variable is negative and significant across the three dependent variables.This suggests that first-generation migrants' support for admitting prospective immigrants decreases over time, which provides support for H4.In addition, the results in the table indicate that first-generation migrants from majority white countries are significantly more supportive of admitting prospective immigrants that have the same race/ethnicity as the majority population, while simultaneously having significantly less positive attitudes about admitting prospective immigrants that have a race/ethnicity different from the majority population or come from a poor country outside of Europe.Therefore, H5 and H6 are supported.Table 4 illustrates the results for the interaction models used to test H7 and H8.The interaction between migration background and personal discrimination is positive and significant, indicating that having been discriminated against further increases immigrants' support for admitting prospective immigrants.This finding is in line with our expectations, as we have argued that experiencing personal discrimination amplifies perceptions of communality and empathy with other oppressed or disadvantaged groups, such as prospective immigrants.Therefore, H7 is supported.The interaction between migration background and assimilation pressure is negative and significant, which means that immigrants living in countries with stringent integration requirements exhibit more negative immigration attitudes than those living in countries with   laissez-faire integration policies.This result is in accordance with our theorising, as we have posited that assimilation pressure diminishes immigrants' perceptions of communality and empathy with prospective immigrants.Thus, H8 is supported.

Mechanisms and robustness checks
In the theory section, we have argued that the effect of migration background on immigration attitudes operates through two mechanisms, threat and solidarity.While we are unable to conclusively test these mechanisms, this section provides suggestive evidence regarding their plausibility.Specifically, we include measures of our mechanisms as control variables in our regression models (see Finkel et al. 2021).If including these additional variables significantly reduces the coefficient size of the main explanatory variable, this would indicate the presence of a mediation effect.We rely on two ESS items asking respondents whether immigrants are bad or good for (A) the economy and (B) cultural life, with both variables ranging from 0 (bad) to 10 (good).The former variable captures the economic component of threat while the latter taps into its cultural dimension. 7As expected, the inclusion of these additional controls leads to a substantial decrease in the coefficient size of migration background, and the two mechanism measures have a positive effect on the dependent variables which indicates that individuals who perceive immigrants as less of an economic and cultural threat are more supportive of immigration.These results support our argument that the effect of migration background on immigration attitudes is mediated by threat perceptions.
We further probe the mechanisms by re-running all of our previous hypothesis tests with the mechanism measures as the dependent variables.In addition to the two measures of threat mentioned in the previous paragraph, we use a third item asking respondents whether immigrants are bad or good for the country in general, with this variable also ranging from 0 (bad) to good (10).All of the independent variables significantly affect the three mechanism measures in the expected directions, which provides further evidence for our assertion that threat perceptions constitute a central mechanism underlying the relationship between migration background and attitudes towards immigration.Detailed results for these additional analyses pertaining to the mechanisms are available in the online appendices.
In addition to exploring the mechanisms, we undertake several robustness checks to ensure that our findings are not sensitive to alternative model specifications.First, we include both interaction terms in Table 4 simultaneously (i.e.estimate a multiple moderation model).Second, we use alternative measures for these moderators.To measure personal discrimination, we use a binary variable capturing whether or not respondents view themselves as members of a group that is being discriminated against in their country.For our second moderator, assimilation pressure, we rely on a variable provided by Alarian and Neureiter (2021) which ranks countries on a scale ranging from 0 to 3 based on the stringency of their integration requirements for family migrants.Third, we test Hypotheses 4, 5 and 6 using the full sample instead of the sub-sample.To do so, we use respondent age as a proxy for duration of residence and interact it with our binary indicator of migration background; while this measure is not ideal, it allows us to retain the maximum number of observations.We also use a binary indicator asking respondents whether they identify as a member of an ethnic minority or the majority group and similarly interact it with respondents' migration background.
Fourth, we opted for parsimony in our main models by including only the most relevant control variables (Achen 2002; Schrodt 2014).To mitigate concerns about omitted variable bias, we re-run our models with additional individual-level (political interest, social trust, life satisfaction, religiosity) and country-level (unemployment rate, GDP per capita, population size, migrant stock, terrorist attacks, asylum applications) controls.Fifth, while the fixed effects models used for our analyses eliminate the possibility of omitted variable bias stemming from time-invariant unobservables, they do not account for other types of potential obstacles to causal inference, particularly trending in the dependent variables.Therefore, we estimate a series of models including country-specific time trends (both linear and quadratic) which correct for this inferential problem (Angrist and Pischke 2015;Bertrand et al. 2004;Carpenter and Dobkin 2011), thereby providing us with additional leverage for establishing causality.Sixth, we re-estimate all of our hypothesis tests as probit models (by collapsing the ordinal outcome variables into binary indicators, coding 'none' and 'few' as 0 and 'some' and 'many' as 1), multinomial logit models, and linear mixed-effects (i.e.multilevel) models.Our results largely hold across all alternative specifications, thus greatly increasing our confidence in their validity.Detailed results for all robustness checks are available in the online appendices.

Conclusion
In this article, we examined the relationship between migration background and immigration attitudes.Specifically, we drew on two competing theoretical perspectives -the minority solidarity thesis and intergroup threat theory -to derive hypotheses about (A) whether immigrants support immigration more or less than individuals without a migration background, (B) which kinds of immigrants support immigration the most (or least), (C) which types of immigration are being supported more or less by immigrants and (D) which contextual factors increase or decrease immigrants' support for immigration.Examining ESS data from 15 West European countries for the period 2002-2019, we found that immigrants are significantly more supportive of immigration than individuals without a migration background.This indicates that overall, the solidarity logic trumps the threat logic, meaning that immigrants' feelings of empathy and kinship with prospective immigrants by and large outweigh their perceptions of prospective immigrants as a potential threat to their cultural status and economic standing.
In addition, our results indicate that not all immigrants support immigration equally.Support for immigration is highest among immigrants who personally and recently went through the process of immigration, which we argue is due to the shared experience of migrating being a major driver of solidarity and, thereby, positive immigration attitudes.As immigrants become more removed from this formative experience, their empathy, solidarity, and identification with prospective immigrants decrease.Moreover, not all forms of immigration are being equally supported by all immigrants.Specifically, our results show that immigrants prefer prospective immigrants who share their race/ethnicity, which suggests that the threat logic becomes more dominant as the cultural distance between an immigrant and prospective immigrants increases.White immigrants also appear to be wary of immigration from poor countries outside of Europe, which we argue is due to economic threat perceptions.A last set of finding to emerge from our analyses demonstrates that certain contextual factors can increase or decrease immigrants' support for immigration.While personal discrimination amplifies solidarity and leads to more positive immigration attitudes among immigrants, assimilation pressure appears to have the opposite effect.
Our research contributes to the growing but still relatively small literatures on immigrant attitudes towards immigration and the immigration attitudes of minorities more generally (Just and Anderson 2015;Meeusen et al. 2019).Compared with these existing studies, our article innovates on two grounds.First, from a theoretical point of view, we not only consider competing perspectives on the direction of the relationship between migration background and immigration attitudes, but also differentiate between different types of immigrants, immigration, and conditions.Therefore, our theoretical framework on solidarity and threat as well as the three categories of factors that determine the relative strength of these two logics has potential applications for future research on immigration attitudes and inter-minority relations more broadly.Second, from an empirical point of view, we extend existing analyses of individual countries and particular settings, such as schools, with a large-n cross-sectional analysis of multiple European countries.This, in combination with our comprehensive set of robustness checks, allows us to confidently generalise our findings to a variety of geographical settings and research contexts.
In addition, our findings have implications that are potentially relevant beyond the study of immigration attitudes and inter-minority relations.First, it has been a long-standing assumption among policymakers and scholars alike that increasing diversity will inevitably lead to societies that are more welcoming towards immigrants.However, our findings add to recent scholarship (Alba 2020) casting doubt on this assumption, as we show that immigrants are not uniformly more supportive of immigration than individuals without a migration background.Specifically, immigration from majority-White countries and intra-EU migration are unlikely to lead to substantial increases in support for immigration from outside of Europe; this, combined with assimilation pressures and threat triggers such as economic strife and deprivation, suggests that widespread anti-immigration sentiments will likely persist even as European societies further diversify.Second, our results are relevant to those interested in political behaviour and party politics, as they indicate that adopting a more immigration-friendly platform is probably not sufficient for parties to increase their appeal to immigrants and minorities.The attitudinal patterns that we uncovered in this study may very well influence immigrants' voting decisions, support for certain immigration policies, and so forth.
Our study has four important limitations.First, due to the study relying on existing data, we were unable to directly measure the theorised mechanisms (i.e.solidarity and threat) linking migration background and immigration attitudes.Second, we are unable to draw any conclusions about which conditions are most important and which of the three groups of factors is most relevant in shaping immigrant attitudes.Future research could build on our theoretical framework and devise a research design that explicitly addresses these shortcomings.Third, despite our extensive investigation and several robustness tests, uncertainties remain about which other factors, such as labour market conditions or war-related displacements, may drive immigrants' attitudes towards immigration and how these factors interact with one another.Fourth, the question to what extent and which parts of our theoretical framework can be applied to the attitudes of other minority groups, such as national minorities or sexual minorities, remains underexplored.We leave it to future research to address these important questions more systematically.

Notes
1.A country that exemplifies such complex demographics is Germany, where roughly one in four people have a migration background (Staudenmaier 2018).

Table 2 .
Migration background and attitudes towards immigration -main effects.
results from ordered probit regression.unstandardised coefficients with robust standard errors clustered by country-year.Weighted by ess pweight and pspweight.

Table 3 .
Migration background and attitudes towards immigration -sub-sample analyses.
results from ordered probit regression.unstandardised coefficients with robust standard errors clustered by country-year.Weighted by ess pweight and pspweight.

Table 4 .
Migration background and attitudes towards immigration -interaction effects.