The Threat Is Real: Labor-Market Competition, Recession and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments in Europe

Standard competition theories in sociology have often confounded psychological with objective dimensions of competitive threat, whilst using very poor measures of the latter in empirical research. This paper investigates the impact of labor-market competition (LMC) on attitudes towards immigration in Europe by testing for both occupational and environmental sources of competitive threat. Using unusually rich information on job characteristics, I distinguish between three different objective dimensions of the occupation that are expected to influence its degree of closure/exposure to competition: 1) job-learning time; 2) manual intensity and 3) monitoring costs. Environmental competition is measured both at the individual as well as the country level using information on subjective perceptions of the economy, GDP contraction and migration inflows. Applying two-step regression techniques to a pool of the 2004 and the 2010 rounds of the European Social Survey, I find strong support for both occupational and environmental determinants of LMC. More precisely, I find that 1) all three occupational sources of LMC play a significant role in shaping natives attitudes towards immigration and this net of individuals’ level of schooling and a host of socio-demographic and attitudinal controls; 2) net average anti-immigrants sentiments increased in Europe between 2004 and 2010 in a way that correlates with the size of GDP losses experienced between these two years at the country level; and 3) the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments was particularly marked in countries that combined deep economic recession with high migration inflows in the previous decade (e.g. Ireland, Greece, Spain).