This book compares anti-immigrant attitudes across 8 countries on 5 continents. It develops a
general framework that explores grievances personal interactions and entrenched beliefs that
explain anti-immigrant attitudes. Using original survey research with 1 000 respondents per
country the authors test the salience of their theoretical expectations across eight very
diverse cases: Australia Brazil Canada Germany Japan South Africa the USA and Turkey.
The empirical study allows to decipher the degree to which the drivers of anti-immigrant
attitudes are universal or context-specific. One the one hand they find that positive
interactions between natives reduce critical attitudes toward immigrants in all 8 countries. On
the other hand there are some country specific differences in the influence of various
grievances and the three proxy variables measuring entrenched beliefs populist attitudes
nationalism and social conservativism. This book appeals to scholars and students of political
sociology comparative politics public opinion research and related fields.
