Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Europe: Contact, Threat Perception, and Preferences for the Exclusion of Migrants

This article introduces the theoretical approaches of contact, group conflict, and symbolic prejudice to explain levels of exclusionary feelings toward a relatively new minority in the West European context, the immigrant. The findings indicate that even after controls for perceived threat are included in the model, intimate contact with members of minority groups in the form of friendships can reduce levels of willingness to expel legal immigrants from the country. A contextual variable, level of immigration to the country, is also introduced into the model because it is likely that this variable affects both threat perception and exclusionary feelings. While context does not seem to directly affect levels of…