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Using data from a cross-nationally harmonised correspondence test, we examined how employers in five European labour markets (Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain) respond to applications received from Muslim job seekers with ancestry from 22 different countries of origin. Drawing on the interdisciplinary literature on anti-Muslim prejudice, we expected that callbacks would depend on characteristics of applicants’ origin countries that could signal cultural value incompatibility and political and military oppression, thus triggering perceptions of symbolic and security threats, respectively. The results point to lower callback rates for Muslims, the higher the level of authoritarianism and gender inequality in their origin country. Results for authoritarianism are especially robust across different operationalizations of threat and model specifications. We also find that the association between authoritarianism and callbacks was only statistically significant for men, indicating that Muslim men are especially at risk of exclusion from employment opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The descendants of immigrants have become increasingly successful in Western European education systems and labor markets, which in principle supports Richard Alba's new assimilation theory (NAT). Still, acceptance and recognition on the part of the mainstream has not kept pace. We have suggested outgroup mobility threat (OMT), the fear of being overtaken by intergenerational mobility, as one possible explanation. However, Richard Alba has argued that demographic changes widely lead to a non-zero-sum mobility and do not necessarily cause competition threat. In this paper, we relate Richard Alba's reasoning to the concept of OMT, focusing on the German immigration context. We bring together the arguments by distinguishing between realistic and symbolic threat and by differentiating between occupations and groups. We measure OMT and test our hypotheses using a vignette study that we recently conducted as part of the kick-off survey of the new National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa) in Germany. Our results confirm that Richard Alba's argument is superior to the simple competitive threat perspective. However, we also show that it is still insufficient, and OMT comes into play when immigrant groups move up into value-based occupations that are assumed to normatively shape society. Moreover, we demonstrate that this threat is felt particularly when Muslims ascend to these types of occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines the following questions: (1) the extent to which individual basic human values are linked with attitudes towards immigration; (2) whether symbolic threat by immigration mediates this relation; and (3) whether cultural values moderate the relations between individual values, threat, and attitudes towards immigration. The empirical analysis relies on the 2014/2015 data from the immigration module of the European Social Survey (ESS) for West and East European countries. We find that universalistic individuals expressed lower threat due to immigration and higher support of immigration while conservative individuals displayed the opposite pattern. Symbolic threat mediated the association between values and immigration attitudes, but in most countries the mediation was partial. The associations between values, symbolic threat, and attitudes towards immigration were stronger in countries characterised by higher levels of intellectual and affective autonomy and weaker in countries characterised by higher levels of cultural embeddedness. The findings provide support for the centrality of human values in the formation of threat and attitudes towards immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe, right-wing populist parties use advertisements that depict symbolic and economic threats posed by immigrants. Yet research on the effects of such advertisements is scarce, especially when it comes to young voters. We theorise that the attitudinal effects of threatening advertisements depend on young voters' education level. In an experiment, a total of N = 162 pupils were randomly assigned to three conditions, a symbolic threat advertisement, an economic threat advertisement or a control condition. Exposure to the symbolic and economic threat advertisements led to a significant increase in negative attitudes towards immigrants. However, the economic threat advertisement was only effective for pupils with lower compared to higher educational degrees. The effects did not depend on party predisposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]