As migration levels have risen, opposition to it has manifested itself, bolstered by populist politicians who are all too happy to blame migrants for the ills of society. New research from Stanford University aims to understand the roots of our feelings towards immigrants, and explores how these feelings of antipathy may be dampened.
The research focuses specifically on feelings towards Muslim immigrants in Germany, and especially the discrimination against them that emerged.
“Opposition toward immigration can be due to economic reasons because of competition for jobs or due to the perceived cultural threat that immigrants pose to their host country by challenging dominant norms and changing the national identity,” the researchers explain.
In Europe however, it seems that the cultural threat is more prevalent than the economic one in determining antipathy towards migration. Germany was chosen to explore this hypothesis, both because of the high level of immigration in recent years, but also because of the cultural respect shown towards social norms. The researchers wanted to explore whether immigrants showing respect for these social norms could reduce the amount of discrimination towards them.
Cultural norms
The researchers staged a scene in a local park whereby a native German man would drop litter, and thus break a clear social norm against doing so. A female researcher would then ask him to put the litter he just dropped in the bin, with the researchers monitoring how bystanders reacted. The same woman would then drop a bag of groceries after answering her mobile phone, with oranges falling out of the bag onto the floor. The idea was to test whether bystanders would help the woman or not.
In some of the scenes, the woman was a native German, while in others she was a Muslim woman in a hijab. Would her signaling of her integration into German culture encourage natives to support her? In total the experiment was run over 1,600 times in 30 cities across both western and eastern Germany.
“We found that bias toward Muslims is too pronounced and is not overcome by good citizenship; immigrant women who wore a hijab always received less assistance relative to German women, even when they followed the rules,” the researchers explain. “But we also found that good citizenship has some benefit, as the degree of discrimination toward Muslims goes down if they signal that they care about the host society. And ethnic or racial differences alone do not cause discrimination in our setup. Nor is religious assimilation—wearing a cross rather than a hijab—necessary to be treated with civility.”
The experiments revealed that women wearing a hijab who did not enforce the social norm received help in around 60% of cases, versus 84% of German looking women who did enforce the norm. The rate of help offered to Muslim women who did enforce the norm was roughly the same as that for German women who did not.
“The reason to run such an experiment focusing on everyday interactions is that it gives you a sense of the accumulated impact of discrimination in shaping perceptions of identity and belonging,” the authors continue. “Getting help to pick up something you drop on the floor seems like a small thing. But these small things—and small slights—add up to form lasting impressions of how others perceive you and, in turn, can inform the immigrants’ own attitudes and behavior toward the host society.”
A nuanced picture
Interestingly, the experiments found that German women were more likely to discriminate against Muslim women than men were, which runs against prevailing media images, which tend to focus on men delivering anti-immigrant actions.
In surveys conducted after the experiments, it emerged that this was most prominent among secular women, with the researchers hypotehsizing that this was due to the perception that Muslim women might be threatening hard-won advances in women’s rights. In other words, it’s a feminist opposition to political Islam.
The researchers plan to test their hypothesis in Greece to explore whether it applies in fresh contexts, before ultimately turning their work into a book where they will outline ways to reduce discrimination among natives and immigrants.
“A key idea in socio-biological theories of inter-group conflict is that there is an almost innate antipathy or suspicion toward members of “out groups” [immigrant], however those groups are defined. But clearly societies can manage sources of tension and avoid conflict escalation since there is very little observed conflict relative to how many different types of inter-group differences exist out there,” they explain. “A lot of the literature on immigration has suggested that assimilation is the key to reducing conflict between natives and immigrants: Immigrants must shed their names, change their religion, or hide their customs so they can be more accepted.”
As migration numbers grow, there is an increasingly important role placed on the successful integration of migrants into their host communities. Studies like this go a long way towards achieving that goal.
