As right-wing populism surges around the world, immigrants and their descendants often face discrimination and become targets of political scapegoating. Yet, the question of which groups of immigrants are targeted by anti-immigrant rhetoric is dependent on a host of factors, and there remains a lack of clear evidence on the reasons underlying xenophobic behavior and the othering of immigrant populations.

A new study, published in the American Political Science Review, introduces a novel international relations perspective, particularly the concept of geopolitical rivalry, into the literature on anti-immigrant sentiment. The study indicates citizens strongly prefer immigrants from non-rival countries over those from rival countries.

The study’s co-authors — including Kiyoteru Tsutsui, APARC deputy director and director of APARC’s Japan Program and Dartmouth College’s Charles Crabtree, a former visiting professor with the Japan Program, shift the research focus of anti-immigrant sentiment to the political dynamics between the immigrants' countries of origin and the destination countries. In doing so, the authors emphasize the importance of going beyond the existing preoccupation with the individual background characteristics of migrants and integrating the study of xenophobia within the global context of political competition and alliances.

Geopolitical Relations and Public Perceptions 

Traditionally, research on anti-immigrant attitudes has concentrated on factors such as race, culture, and labor market impacts. By contrast, Tsutsui and his co-authors build on the view that the political relations between immigrants’ origin and host countries shape citizen attitudes toward them. The researchers draw on this international relations perspective to argue that immigrants (as opposed to refugees) from countries with contentious or conflictual relationships with the host country are generally less welcomed than those from allied nations.

To test this argument, the researchers used a method known as a forced-choice conjoint experiment, a technique whereby social scientists present survey participants with a series of hypothetical scenarios in which they must choose between two or more options — in this case, potential immigrants — each described by a set of varying attributes. Tsutsui and his co-authors had survey participants choose between two candidates for permanent residency, differentiated by their country of origin and various other attributes typically used in experiments to determine if labor market concerns outweigh preferences for specific immigrants.

The researchers fielded the experiment with nationally representative samples in 22 democracies, mostly in Europe and the Americas but also Asia and South Africa. They assigned four countries of origin to the immigrant profiles: two countries of origin with a similar racial and cultural make-up as the majority of the survey respondents, a rival country and an ally; and two countries with a different racial and cultural make-up.

The results strongly support the geopolitical rivalry argument: “In each of the survey countries, immigrants from non-rival countries are strongly preferred over those from rival countries,” the co-authors write. “The effect is so large that it results in a net preference for immigrants from countries with a dissimilar racial and cultural makeup than the majority of the host country.”

The researchers also show that the greater the respondents’ sense of their own country’s superiority, the stronger the international relations of their governments are mirrored in their preferences for immigrants. Furthermore, they find that members of ethno-racial majorities are more prone to the rivalry effect because they are more strongly identified with their nation compared to minority members.

The authors demonstrate that, for instance, in Western Europe, immigrants from Russia are less favored, while in East Asia, Chinese immigrants face similar hostility. This animosity towards immigrants from rival nations leads to a net preference for those with different racial or cultural backgrounds compared to the more favorable reception of immigrants from allied countries.

“The mechanisms we document in this article play an important part in the overall dynamic leading to the selective rejection or acceptance of immigrants,” Tsutsui and his colleagues summarize.

Addressing Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

In their empirical analysis, the researchers found minimal evidence of broad anti-Asian sentiment or “Sinophobia” beyond the effects of political rivalry. This conclusion holds consistently across various survey countries, continents, and immigrant origin countries. The detailed examination by survey country indicates that generalized racial or cultural biases did not significantly influence the observed preference for immigrants from politically aligned countries. The authors propose that future research expand the sample of survey countries, update and refine measures of political rivalry, and include a broader range of immigrant origins.

The study offers a new lens connecting geopolitical rivalries with xenophobia, providing a more nuanced understanding of public attitudes toward immigrants. Policymakers and researchers can use this framework to better anticipate and address potential backlash against immigrants from countries with politically contentious relations. Informed immigration policies that promote multiculturalism and social inclusion start with a deeper grasp of the forces shaping public perceptions and attitudes toward immigrants.

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Click the link for a transcript of “Taking the Temperature on Climate Change."

Climate Policy in the United States

Changes in climate are going to affect most, if not all, of us in the U.S. And public opinion has certainly changed on this in the last 10 years. Many more Americans are on board that the climate is changing and that we should do something about it. There's much more support for climate legislation across the board from Democrats and increasingly from Republicans.

Anyone who works on climate was really excited to see the platform Biden ran on, because it was really the first mainstream presidential campaign where climate had played a fundamental role. There's been a lot of discussion aboutthe importance of climate, the damages from climate that are already happening, and what we need to do is take aggressive action in the future to deal with the problem.

But there are specific industries who are going to be harmed by this legislation, and they are quite organized in fighting this legislation, and in funding politicians who fight it, and in funding organizations, either transparently or not, that are fighting climate legislation.

We are closer than we’ve ever been to really meaningful legislation on climate change. The optimistic view is that we’re on the right trajectory and that we’re going to get some part of this done eventually. But we’re not there yet.
 

COP26: Climate Change on the Global Stage

A “COP” is a “Conference of the Parties,” which is an annual meeting of the signatories of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The main focus of Glasgow was to get countries to be very transparent about how they are going to achieve the ambitions for combating climate change that they articulated at the last major COP summit in Paris.

Was it a success? A lot of countries did come to the table in Glasgow and made commitments in ways that they hadn't done before. There were also new, important agreements on certain greenhouse gasses that we've learned recently are pretty damaging, like methane.

Where we failed to make progress was on something that's called “loss and damage.” Many developing countries argue that they are suffering the damages from climate change even though it is a problem that they have not caused, and they are seeking compensation from developed countries who have been the drivers of climate change. That issue was on the table in Glasgow, but it got put off until next year in Egypt.

The Forecast for the Future

Progress is being made. Emissions are falling in the U.S. They're falling in California. They're falling in the EU. They're pretty flat around the world. And these are not just the per capita emissions, but overall emissions are now going down in many parts of the world, which is a huge success.

Where has that progress come from? In part from government policies that have been successful in mitigation. But the driving factor has really been longer decadal investments by both the public sector and the private sector in technologies that allow us to produce energy in a clean way. It’s a combination of long-term public support through taxes and subsidies for the development of these technologies alongside private sector deployment of these technologies at huge scale.
 

It’s important for people to know about these successes. But it’s also important for us to realize what we don’t know. Emissions in different parts of the world are falling, and that’s fantastic. But it’s also true that people are already getting sick, being harmed, and dying because of the changes we’re already experiencing.  We’re poorly adapted to the climate we live in now, much less the climate of a two-degree warmer or three-degree warmer future, and the science on that needs to be much more widely understood.

I think a huge role for us as academics is not only to do the research to understand those questions, but to get that information out into the world. The great thing about the Freeman Spolgi Institute and institutions like FSI is that it's part of our mandate to translate this research out into the broader world. The translation of what we already know is important, as is the imperitive to drill down on and study the things that we don't.

On Feb. 12, White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien announced that the U.S. government has “evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal information in systems it maintains and sells around the world.” This represents the latest attempt by the Trump administration to support an argument that allied governments—and the businesses they oversee—should purge certain telecommunications networks of Huawei equipment. The position reflects the preferred approach in the United States, which is to issue outright bans against select companies (including Huawei) that meet an as-yet-unknown threshold of risk to national security.

Read the rest at Lawfare Blog

In Aug. 2019, Bobby Chesney (from Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and Max Smeets (from ETH Zurich and also Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)) convened a workshop in Amsterdam focusing on military operations in the cyber domain, from a transatlantic perspective. The “Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations—Amsterdam” gathered experts from military, civilian, and academic institutions hailing from a range of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and France.

Read the Rest at Lawfare Blog

Scholars Corner is an ongoing SPICE initiative to share FSI’s cutting-edge social science research with high school and college classrooms nationwide and international schools abroad.

This Scholars Corner video features New York Times bestselling author Francis Fukuyama discussing the recent rise of identity politics, both in the United States and around the world. “In the 20th century we had a politics that was organized around an economic axis, primarily. You had a left that worried about inequality…and you had a right that was in favor of the greatest amount of freedom,” summarizes Fukuyama. “[N]ow we are seeing a shift in many countries away from this focus on economic issues to a polarization based on identity.”

According to Fukuyama, this shift in politics is reflected in such domestic social movements as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, as well as in international movements like the Catalan independence movement, white nationalism, and even the Islamic State.

To hear more of Dr. Fukuyama’s analysis, view the video here: “The Rise and Implications of Identity Politics.” For other Scholars Corner episodes, visit our Scholars Corner webpage. Past videos have covered topics such as cybersecurity, immigration and integration, and climate change.

"Identity" hardcover book by Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at FSI and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. This video is based on his recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, which was recognized as The Times (UK) Best Books of 2018, Politics, and Financial Times Best Books of 2018.

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