Consistency or double standard in migration attitudes? Exploring the combination of attitudes towards immigrants and emigrants / ¿Coherencia o doble estándar en las actitudes migratorias? Explorando la combinación de actitudes hacia los inmigrantes y los emigrantes

Abstract

While attitudes towards immigrants (foreigners in ‘our country’) have been widely studied, we know much less about attitudes towards emigrants (co-ethnics who left ‘our country’), and particularly about how native majority ‘stayers’ think about these categories of migrants in tandem and whether they judge them by double standards. We examined this in the Netherlands, where both immigration and emigration are common but only immigration is debated. We used a nationally diverse sample of 617 Dutch participants. Through latent profile analyses, we identified subgroups of people holding consistent attitudes towards immigrants and emigrants, but we also detected double-standard profiles characterized by positive attitudes towards one group and negative towards the other. Age, education, country ownership and place attachment predicted profile membership. Further, people in anti-immigrant profiles, regardless of their opinions about emigrants, were more likely to vote for radical right-wing parties, confirming that in the Netherlands, emigration attitudes do not additionally explain this voting preference. We highlight the importance of researching such double standards in other countries where emigration is, alongside immigration, a salient societal issue.