Network Analysis of Attitudes towards Immigrants in Asia

This study models cross-national attitudes towards immigrants in East and Southeast Asia as a signed and weighted bipartite network of countries and evaluative reactions to a variety of political issues, or determinants. This network is then projected into two one-mode networks, one of countries and one of determinants, and community detection methods are applied. The paper aims to fill two deficiencies in the current research on attitudes towards immigrants:

1. the lack of cross-national studies in Asia, a region where migration is growing, and 2) the tendency of researchers to treat determinants as uncorrelated, despite the interdependent nature of evaluative reactions. The results show that the nine countries in the sample are a cohesive clique, showing greater similarities than differences in the determinants of their attitudes. A blockmodeling approach was employed to identify eight determinants in attitudes towards immigrants, namely views on independence and social dependencies, group identities, absolute or relative moral orientation, attitudes towards democracy, science and technology, prejudice and stigma, and two determinants related to religion. However, the findings of this survey yielded some surprising results when compared with the literature review. First, education was not found to be a significant determinants of attitudes towards immigrants, despite its strong and consistent predictive power in European models. Second, prejudice appears to be mediated in part by religion, especially in religious identification and belief in God. Group identity and prejudice also appear to be related, though only weakly. Finally, anxiety appears in clusters related to social norms, suggesting that fears regarding immigrants relates closely to expectations of others’ behavior.