International migration has risen dramatically over the past half century, more than tripling in size from 77 million in 1960 to almost 258 million in 2017 (United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UN DESA], 2017). In turn, this global phenomenon of people crossing national borders has increasingly become a pressing social, economic and political issue for governments all over the world – as evidenced by Brexit and the ongoing migration crisis in Europe, large-scale displacement of refugees in Southeast Asia and Africa, and the hot-button immigration policy debates under the Trump administration in the United States.
With the ushering of a demographic transformation in many developed democracies, migrant inflows can potentially influence countries’ policy-making processes, escalate societal conflicts, raise questions on welfare and redistribution, as well as impact the labor market, education system and health sector. Coupled with ideological discourses, immigration issues may be used by politicians as a powerful but asymmetrical tool for voter mobilization (Brooks, Manza, & Cohen, 2016; Harteveld, Kokkonen, & Dahlberg, 2017). But whether it profoundly affects domestic politics, and how exactly it does, hinges importantly on the attitudes of native-born groups toward immigrants and immigration itself (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014).
By its nature, immigration lies at the nexus of citizenship and cosmopolitanism, and is also a legal concept that defines who belongs within the boundaries of a state and where the law draws the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In contrast to other salient national concerns that may go unnoticed by the masses because of the amount of technical knowledge needed to understand them, immigrants are very visible as people whom one can encounter in daily life. Thus, immigration is a concern wherein the public feels it has much at stake, especially once it intersects with other contentious issues such as race, multiculturalism, crime, terrorism, and negative impacts of globalization.
Over the past decades, studies have shown the two-way relationship between public opinion and policy, and how they can shape and reshape each other (Campbell, 2012; Page &
Shapiro, 1983). In the case of the US, conventionally dubbed as a ‘nation built on immigrants’, public policy on immigration followed public opinion up to the mid-1960s. However, after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 – which abolished ethnocentric national origin quotas
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and set up the family reunification principle – opposition to immigration suddenly spiked up. At least in the U.S., after 1965 and in recent years, public policy has rarely reflected public opinion on immigration (Lee, 1998; Thompson, 2018). On the contrary, the UK’s Brexit, in which immigration played a central role, demonstrated how a government might implement the results of a national referendum against its preferred option. These examples, among others, illustrate the enduring relevance of public opinion on immigration to public policy, and consequently, to both domestic and international politics.
To understand public opinion better, it is necessary not just to study its implications, but to also flip the coin and look into how attitudes and preferences on immigration are formed. The extent of research previously done on this broad and ever-expanding question is reflected in recent reviews (eg. Ceobanu & Escandell, 2010; Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014). Predictably, most studies are concentrated on settler societies or ‘immigrant nations’, such as the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and more recently, Western European states. What may come as surprising is how this formidable body of literature consisting of largely economic and psychosocial explanations has tended to overlook the importance of political factors such as ideology (Brooks et al., 2016; Hlavac, 2011; Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014; Medeiros, Figueiredo, Batista, Campos, Rosendo, & Coêlho, 2011).
In an attempt to address these gaps, the main questions being asked in this proposal are:
1. Is there a relationship between political factors and public opinion toward immigrants and immigration in East Asia?
2. More specifically: do ideological and political attitudes such as defensive
nationalism, social traditionalism, and social trust influence support for immigration in nontraditional immigrant destinations such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan?
It seems fit to study these three because they are the newly-industrialized, democratic countries in East Asia. They are often put together by other scholars because of their interrelated immigration histories and similar policy trajectories. While they have already transitioned from being emigrant senders to immigrant receivers, other countries, especially in Southeast Asia (with the exception of Singapore and Malaysia), send more of their people abroad. In addition, they also have shared narratives of early civilizations and overlapping cultural norms.
As nationalism can be a complicated, multidimensional concept, this study adopts a narrower definition from literature, termed here ‘defensive nationalism’ – uncritical support for
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the nation that leads to a feeling of superiority and contempt for foreigners, as well as their way of life (Jeong, 2013; Latcheva, 2010). Social traditionalism refers to a set of values that uphold agreement to norms and the status quo, resisting liberal thoughts and lifestyles that may disrupt harmony in society (Altemeyer, 1981; Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010). Distinct from political trust, which involves vertical trust in elites or institutions, social trust is a horizontal or interpersonal trust in others – faith in people – that they can put others’ interests at heart and not willingly harm another person. It is at the core of social capital, often theorized as the secret ingredient for a society’s rise and fall in many aspects.
The purpose of this study is threefold: first, to contribute to the development of current discussions by focusing on the impact of political factors on the formation of immigration preferences and support; second, to bridge existing research on the ‘Western’ realm of
economically advanced countries with its East Asian counterparts; and third, to see if patterns of similarities and differences between the three countries in focus exist, especially with their intersecting histories and economies.
Contrary to most of the previous research on political factors, this study will not use the widely-accepted conceptualization of ideology along a single ‘left’ to ‘right’ dimension. Instead, it will focus on certain ideological attitudes, namely: defensive nationalism and social
traditionalism, as well as social trust. Logistic regression will be applied to data from the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey conducted between 2014 and 2016 to find the relationship between political attitudes and support for immigration in the three East Asian countries under analysis. The hypotheses are that: individuals who agree more with defensive nationalism and social traditionalism will be less supportive of immigration, while those who are more inclined to trust most people, even strangers, will also be more supportive of immigration.
The significance and relevance of this study is underscored by the fact that Asia has recently overtaken Europe as the region with the largest flows in both inward (80 million) and outward (110 million) migration (UN DESA, 2017). Additionally, East Asian countries in particular, are slowly turning to immigration-related solutions to the combined demographic problems of consistently low fertility rates, a rapidly aging population, and a declining labor force. Compared to traditional settler societies in the West, however, immigration policies are much more constrained by public opinion in East Asia (Staedicke, Batalova, & Zong, 2016).
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This study is organized as follows. The next chapter provides a brief background on the immigration situation in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In chapter three, the literature on public opinion towards immigration is surveyed, further discussing the influence of political factors on immigration preference, as well as the East Asian perspective. Chapter four focuses on the theoretical bases and assumptions underpinning this study; while chapter five details the research design to be implemented, including the source of data, variables, and the choice of regression technique. Chapter six discusses the results of empirical analyses, and finally, the last chapter concludes the study.