Established and Excluded? Immigrants’ Economic Progress, Attitudes toward Immigrants, and the Conditioning Role of Egalitarianism and Intergroup Contact

Immigrants’ economic progress, on the one hand, serves as an indicator of successful integration and should serve to mitigate natives’ concerns about potential economic or welfare state–related burdens of immigration. On the other hand, the fact of immigrants improving their social status may also induce perceptions of competition and group-related relative deprivation. This study examines whether immigrants’ progress leads either to improved attitudes toward immigrants or to a greater perception of immigration-related threat. Specifically, I focus on how individuals’ egalitarian values and experiences in intergroup contact condition their responses to immigrants’ economic progress. Using data from the European Social Survey 2014, combined with country-level change scores in income gaps between natives and immigrants, I find that respondents who encountered negative experiences in intergroup contact respond to immigrants’ progress with increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. A survey experiment manipulating exposure to information about group-specific income trends mirrors this finding. The results have important implications for debates about immigrants’ integration and the economic motives underlying immigration-related attitudes.