Comparing Regional Attitudes toward Immigrants in Six European Countries

Abstract

Many immigrants have risked their lives searching for a better future by crossing the Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean. The Canary Islands became the centre of another emerging humanitarian and human rights crisis at Europe’s frontier in 2020. The study aims to analyse whether attitudes towards immigrants are affected by territories close to these humanitarian crises. To this end, the study is based on previous studies using a Fuzzy-Hybrid TOPSIS method to analyse attitudes toward immigrants. The synthetic indicator will be built upon a set of eight indicators that proxy the ethnic, economic, cultural, and religious threats experienced by the citizens. The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) dataset for the year 2013 for six countries, namely Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, United Kingdom, and Portugal, will be used. Results show that the attitude toward immigrants is affected by the territorial dimension as classified by the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics at NUTS2 and NUTS3 levels, and that attitudes are very different between those of some of the archipelagos and islands considered in the study. In particular, our results point out a sort of duality between the Balearic Islands—the most open territory toward immigrants, and Corse—the least open territory toward immigrants.