Society’s attitudes towards impact of immigration: case of EU countries

Abstract

One of the most pressing problems nowadays attracting attention of EU citizens is the integration of immigrants. During the recent period immigration flows to the EU, especially external, were growing considerably – the number of international immigrants in the EU has increased by 57.5 percent over 2000 – 2015. One of the factors leading to successful integration of immigrants is attitudes towards them regarding their impact on countries’ socio-economic, cultural or other transformation. Empirical studies show that immigration can lead to both positive and negative effects on countries’ demography, economy, culture and criminogenic situation depending on the immigrants’ education, age, gender and other characteristics. Nevertheless, even if immigration leads to a positive transformation of the country, society’s attitude towards immigration can be negative and this can complicate the process of integration. For this reason, it is important to investigate not only the effects of immigration on countries’ demography, economy, culture and other areas, but also to investigate society’s attitudes towards benefits and losses of immigration. We employed binary logistic regression to analyse the EU society’s attitudes towards consequences of immigration. The results show that public attitudes toward consequences of immigration are largely negative, especially towards impact on criminogenic situation and this does not match actual impact empirically researched by other authors and presented in the literature review.