The Political Attitudes of Immigrants and Natives in Germany and Great Britain.

Although many studies have examined the economic status of immigrants, most studies of immigration have neglected immigrant opinions. When immigration is addressed at all using survey data, studies almost exclusively focus on native attitudes toward immigration and not on attitudes of immigrants themselves. In this paper, we investigate whether immigrants and natives have systematically different attitudes toward social spending and redistribution. We employ surveys from Germany and Great Britain that sample a relatively large number of immigrants compared to typical national election surveys. In addressing this potential “opinion gap,” we control for socioeconomic characteristics, such as income and education as well as immigrants’ ability to assimilate into their new country’s labor market by comparing an immigrant’s skill level with his or her actual occupation in the new country. We also include contextual covariates to account for potential network effects. Our statistical analyses use ordered logistical regressions and are fully interactive (following Franzese 1999), consistent with our theoretical expectation that the models’ independent variables affect natives differently than they do immigrants. Once these controls are included, we observe that immigrants are never more likely than natives to favor increases in social spending or to endorse redistributive measures. In instances where we do find a significant opinion gap between natives and immigrants, the latter tend to support more conservative positions, favoring tax cuts at the expense of social spending. While some of our findings are preliminary in nature, they nevertheless represent a significant contribution to the extant literature, which, to our knowledge, does not include comparative studies on the political attitudes of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]