Jack Citrin

Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States

Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration. We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower levels of immigration. The underpinnings of individual attitudes are similar in all countries and immigration attitudes are surprisingly unrelated to country-level differences in GDP, unemployment and the number and composition of the foreign born. An implication of these findings is that acceptance of higher levels of immigration, deemed by many to be an economic need, will require both more selective immigration policies and an emphasis on the cultural assimilation of newcomers.

Can Europe Exist Without Europeans? Problems of Identity in a Multinational Community

Modem nationalism was born in Europe, and it is there where some scholars and politicians are mounting a death watch. For instance, Jiirgen Habennas (1994) has pronounced that the nation-state in Europe is in a terminal state. The Czech President, Vaclav Havel, has stated that national sovereignty is an outmoded concept in European politics. Indeed, in 1988, the Danish Prime Minister, Paul Schluter, called the nation-state the twin of the industrial society and, therefore, an outworn structure soon to be extinct. And the German Prime Minister, Gerhard Schroeder, has proposed a federated United States of Europe that would have a directly elected governinent exercising authority over all constituent countries (New York Times 1 May 2001: AI). The idea of a united Europe flexing its muscles to limit American economic and diplomatic power has widespread support among elite groups (Wallace and Wallace 2000). Even in 1991and 1992, when substantial popular opposition to the Maastricht Treaty arose and a sense of crisis loomed within the European Union (EU), a survey found that more than 90% of the elites in every country favored moving further toward political union (Karlheinz Reif, personal communication). But are ordinary people prepared to follow? Karl Kaiser, a German scholar of international affairs, claims that there has been a qualitativejump in the sense of a European identity.What you are seeing are the first signs of shared beliefs, rights and responsibilities of young Europeans (New York Times 14 January 2000: A3). This assertion is the starting-point for the analysis of public opinion presented here.

Ethnoreligious Identity, Immigration, and Redistribution

Do increasing, and increasingly diverse, immigration flows lead to declining support for redistributive policy? This concern is pervasive in the literatures on immigration, multiculturalism and redistribution, and in public debate as well. The literature is nevertheless unable to disentangle the degree to which welfare chauvinism is related to (a) immigrant status or (b) ethnic difference. This paper reports on results from a web-based experiment designed to shed light on this issue. Representative samples from the United States, Quebec, and the “Rest-of-Canada” responded to a vignette in which a hypothetical social assistance recipient was presented as some combination of immigrant or not, and Caucasian or not. Results from the randomized manipulation suggest that while ethnic difference matters to welfare attitudes, in these countries it is immigrant status that matters most. These findings are discussed in light of the politics of diversity and recognition, and the capacity of national policies to address inequalities.

American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism: Multiculturalism and Party Politics

The multicultural moment in American politics begins in the turbulent 1960s. Cultural nationalism and cries for black power among African-American activists; the embrace of affirmative action by the Johnson administration and then, more briefly, by Richard Nixon; immigration reform and its consequences for language policy; and the emergence of feminist and gay rights movements together made claims based on group identity a prominent feature of political debate. The multicultural movement argued that representation and recognition of disadvantaged groups – defined variously by race, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexual orientation – is paramount to attaining equal access to desired resources in society, whether money, power, or status. And these historically disadvantaged groups and demographic minorities merited special assistance from the government to overcome the obstacles they confront in the crucible of majoritarian politics. The gradual adumbration of these ideas in elections, government policy, and academic debates proceeded apace through the 1970s and beyond. As multiculturalism and diversity became political catchwords, the social and ideological underpinnings of party politics underwent radical change. The civil rights movement precipitated the collapse of the New Deal coalition that had undergirded the dominance of the Democrats in national politics between 1932 and 1968. Civil unrest, the war in Vietnam, and the issues of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” further prodded a realignment that ended the South’s exceptional status as a one-party Democratic region. This nationalization of electoral politics culminated in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. But well before that the two major parties began to polarize, with potential implications for conflict over policies related to the balance of national and ethnic identities.