Your paper ‘Queen Bee Immigrant: The effects of status perception on immigration attitudes’ won the best paper award at the 8th Young Economists’ Meeting in Brno in 2023. How does your paper move the debate on immigration forward?
There is a vast literature on immigration in general, and on immigration attitudes in particular. While I build on previous studies, my research explores the topic of immigration attitudes from a different angle. I do not investigate how ‘native majorities’ view immigrants, but how the ‘established immigrant population’ in a host country perceive new waves of immigration to that country. People with an ‘immigration background’ - first or second-generation immigrants - living in European countries are numerous. In Germany, where I conducted my study, they represent between 25% and 30% of the population.
My research explores the seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon, observed in many Western democracies, whereby parts of the established immigrant population oppose new waves of immigration and support anti-immigration platforms. To take an example from Europe, in the 2017 federal election in Germany, AfD - the right-wing populist anti-immigration party - achieved higher support among Russian-speaking Germans compared to the national average. The recent success of Donald Trump as a US presidential candidate among Latinx community provides another example. Why would groups with a history of immigration that are perceived by natives as immigrants be against new waves of immigration? My research endeavour aimed to answer this question.
How did you examine this complex and counter-intuitive phenomenon?
I started by looking at the status of the immigrant groups already established in Germany. By status, I do not mean the socio-economic status, but how socially desirable a group of immigrants is perceived as by the host society. My hypothesis was that the ‘relative status deprivation’, meaning the degree to which a given national/ethnic group is ranked as low in the ethnic status hierarchy of the host country, has a negative impact on the attitudes of its members toward lower-ranked groups.
I ran an experiment with a sample of 1,159 participants with an immigration background who are German residents. I exposed the survey participants to an opinion about their national/ethnic group that I previously collected from a separate smaller sample of German nationals. Thereby, participants were randomly split into two treatment groups. In the ‘positive treatment’, participants received a positive evaluation of their group, as evaluated by Germans, while in the ‘negative treatment’ they received a negative one. The idea of the treatment is to randomly manipulate participants’ perception of the status enjoyed by their own national group. In the next step, I observed whether the treatment has an effect on participants’ attitudes towards refugees from the Middle East.
I chose to study the perceptions of established immigrants towards Middle East refugees for two reasons. First, since the 2015 refugee crisis, Germany has received many asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Second, results from studies by other scholars reveal that immigrants and refugees from the Middle East are perceived more critically compared to those from other regions and, therefore, occupy a low status position in their host societies.
How did you measure participants’ support for Middle East refugees? And what is the main outcome from your research?
To measure support, I used a method applied by other scholars. I gave survey participants a small amount of money, and, at the end of the survey, I asked them if they would like to donate part (or all) of that money to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to support Middle East refugees trying to reach Germany. I looked at whether participants in the positive treatment group and those in the negative treatment one differed in terms of how much money they donated to help Middle East refugees. I saw that there was a significant difference in terms of the pledged donation between the two groups. Compared to immigrants in the positive treatment group, those in the negative treatment one donated much smaller amounts to help refugees, while not altering their generosity towards others, in a general setting unrelated to immigration. This result confirmed my hypothesis that exposing survey participants (the ‘established immigrants’) to a negative evaluation of their national group by Germans – the concept of the ‘relative status deprivation’ that I explained earlier - leads to participants being more negative towards people belonging to a lower status group (refugees from the Middle East). This is the main result of my research.
I want to underline that the mechanism of the ‘relative status deprivation’ applies only when a group addresses another one that has a lower status. This is reminiscent of the so-called ‘queen bee’ phenomenon, which I refer to in the title of my paper. I borrowed the expression ‘queen bee’ from a well-established theory in sociological studies. The ‘queen bee phenomenon’ refers to the fact that women in positions of high status, in male dominated environments, end up treating their female junior colleague - therefore a lower status category - more harshly than the male colleagues. This is not the result of a behavioural trait inherent to being a woman, but a consequence of the environment that surrounds these women leaders and forces them to show no softness towards lower status, young female colleagues. I chose to borrow the ‘queen bee’ term, as my research shows that a similar phenomenon – harsh treatment from a higher status group towards a lower status group – applies also in the immigration field.
Did you receive any unexpected answers in your survey? Can the outcome of your research be relevant for policymakers?
Interestingly, when I asked topical questions such as “Do you think that refugees would increase the risk of a terrorist attack?’’, or “Are refugees a burden on our country, because they take our jobs and social benefits?”, I did not notice a difference in the replies between the two treatment groups. That was surprising. However, when I asked “Do you think Germany should increase or decrease the number of people it grants asylum to?”, I observed a difference. Participants in the negative treatment group said that Germany should restrict its asylum policy and decrease the number of incoming refugees.
Overall, my research suggests that the way host country nationals consider established immigrants and the integration strategies that Western countries adopt today have consequences on the political attitudes of the immigrant population towards new immigrants and refugees. This can be relevant for policymakers in many ways, also considering that the percentage of the immigrant population is increasing in all Western countries and, therefore, also in the share of this population group in the overall electorate.
Biljana Meiske is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, working on the POSTNORM project led by EUI Professor Elias Dinas. Prior to this experience, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI Department of Economics.
Biljana Meiske’s academic background is in economics, but she also investigates political science topics such as discrimination, immigration, perceptions of inequality, and conflict behaviour. Her research uses insights from behavioural economics and experimental methods to study conflict and cooperative behaviour.