Generational Change and Attitudes to Immigration

This paper examines the extent to which generational change is likely to be producing attitude change on the issue of immigration in Europe. Using multi-level modelling on seven rounds of the European Social Survey (2002–2014) and 16 European countries, we investigate the question of whether there are significant differences in anti-immigration sentiment between cohorts of Europeans, focusing on the roles that education and far-right mobilisation are likely to play in the process of generational change. The paper’s findings indicate that it is the most educated amongst the youngest cohorts who appear to be persistently more positive about immigration, even controlling for aging processes, but this combined effect of cohort and education diminishes for younger cohorts socialised in the context of a strong far-right anti-immigration presence. Thus, generational-change-induced attitude change in the realm of immigration attitudes may be occurring but this is likely to be dependent on individuals having adequate education skills to process the vast changes brought by immigration; in contexts where the far-right is likely to be mobilising anti-immigration sentiment these education skills appear to have a more limited impact on attitudes to immigration.