Public perceptions of immigration are often inaccurate, yet research lacks conceptual clarity and valid measurement of these misperceptions. Prior work focuses mainly on population innumeracy (misestimating immigrant shares) and cannot distinguish genuine misperceptions from mere guessing. We introduce a survey module that captures multiple dimensions of immigration-related perceptions alongside respondents’ confidence in their estimates. Using population survey data from Switzerland, we develop confidence-weighted indicators that separate misperception from guessing. Although inaccurate perceptions are widespread across several immigration domains, they are less prevalent than often assumed; guessing accounts for a substantial share of observed inaccuracy. This measurement strategy enables more precise empirical tests of theories linking perceptions to political attitudes and behavior.

Central to the UK’s Referendum on EU membership, immigration concerns underpinned support for Leave. This article examines ethnic minority support for Brexit, comparing their immigration attitudes with white British voters. Why immigrants and ethnic minorities would support immigration controls through voting Leave presents a theoretical puzzle with existing research finding they generally hold positive attitudes to immigration. Drawing on focus groups and interviews, I find opposition to Eastern European immigration motivated ethnic minority Leave support, who bolstered their own position as “good” immigrants while denigrating Eastern Europeans as “bad” immigrants. This echoes emerging trends of minoritized groups opposing newer migrants, including increased Latino/x support for Trump in 2024. White British Leave voters, however, rarely distinguished between EU and non-EU migrants, often including British ethnic minorities in their “mental image” of immigrants. Thus, tighter borders may do little to quell qualms over immigration which (partly) reflect concerns over rising racial diversity.

Political polarization is a group phenomenon in which opposing factions, often of unequal size, exhibit asymmetrical influence and behavioral patterns. Within these groups, elites and masses operate under different motivations and levels of influence, challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet, existing methods for measuring polarization in social networks typically reduce it to a single value, assuming homogeneity in polarization across the entire system. While such approaches confirm the rise of political polarization in many social contexts, they overlook structural complexities that could explain its underlying mechanisms. We propose a method that decomposes existing polarization and alignment measures into distinct components. These components separately capture polarization processes involving elites and masses from opposing groups. Applying this method to Twitter discussions surrounding the 2019 and 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that (1) opposing groups rarely have a balanced contribution to observed polarization, and (2) while elites strongly contribute to structural polarization and consistently display greater alignment across various topics, the masses, too, have recently experienced a surge in alignment. Our method provides an improved analytical lens through which to view polarization, explicitly recognizing the complexity of and need to account for elite-mass dynamics in polarized environments.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, subnational regions have become increasingly polarized with regard to anti-immigration attitudes. However, the reasons behind geographical changes over time are unclear. We argue that regional labor market risks are a key and overlooked factor driving residential choices and subsequent attitudinal change. We rely on georeferenced panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) in combination with rich regional labor market data from the German microcensus. Our findings confirm that prospects of economic risk reduction drive moving decisions and subsequently reduce anti-immigration sentiment, especially among workers with transferable skills. This has decisive macro-level implications: regions receiving a large share of risk-reducing movers over time show lower levels of anti-immigration sentiment. Our contribution implies that economic motivations matter for residential choices beyond cultural sorting, individual attitudes adjust to the conditions of destination, and geographical patterns are mostly driven by booming regions becoming ever more liberal.

Over the last decade, the Scottish Government have pursued a positive, highly visible immigration politics, despite Scotland lacking formal immigration powers and being enveloped within a United Kingdom that has simultaneously pursued an increasingly securitised approach. With securitisation intensifying globally, coupled with a rise in, and political success of, anti-immigration parties and actors, this article investigates the question of why the Scottish Government has pursued a desecuritising approach – a neglected strand of (de)securitisation studies that principally focuses on the how. We draw on insights from ontological security studies to investigate the Scottish Government’s desecuritisation activity between 2014 and 2024, demonstrating that, whilst there are rationalist-materialist explanations, desecuritisation was not inevitable. Instead, by exploring the relationship between immigration and the construction of the Scottish self at the ontological level we can more fully understand the drivers behind desecuritisation. Pursuing a desecuritised immigration politics is shown, first, to support the Scottish Government’s core autobiographical narrative about who ‘Scotland’ is (open, welcoming, and internationalist), and second, through nurturing a Lacanian fantasy, to be affectively rewarding. Last, the article contributes to the (re)conceptualisation of linearity and temporality in (de)securitisation studies, showcasing contemporary-orientated desecuritisation moves dovetailing with moves aimed at an institutional ‘future-proofing’ of desecuritised immigration governance.

We study bias in judicial authorities’ efforts to rehabilitate and reintegrate immigrant offenders into society. Our empirical strategy leverages a distinctive feature of the German criminal code: the optional application of rehabilitative juvenile criminal law or punitive general criminal law for eighteen- to twenty-year-old offenders, based on a subjective assessment of offenders’ psychological ‘maturity’ by judges. Drawing on complete records of 792,000 court hearings between 2009 and 2018, we show that immigrant offenders are about ten percentage points less likely to be sentenced under juvenile law compared to natives convicted for the same crime. The immigrant–native gap in rehabilitative justice correlates with anti-immigrant sentiment across space and has spiked in recent years, suggesting a link between the salience of group-based identities and judicial decision-making. Our findings raise concerns about equal legal treatment and highlight that biases in the application of rehabilitative justice may contribute to higher recidivism rates among immigrant offenders.

This article investigates how early modern migrants articulated identification with their host society in the context of the late eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, a period preceding modern nationalism. Drawing on a unique dataset derived from the Prize Papers – a collection of testimonies from captured sailors interrogated by British Admiralty courts – we analyze migrants’ declarations of sovereign allegiance. We assess how factors such as duration of residence, local citizenship (poorterschap), occupational rank, and marital status influenced migrants’ identification with their adopted polity. Using logistic regression, we find that civic institutional embeddedness, reflected in city citizenship, and occupational rank, especially among ship captains, significantly predicted identification with the Dutch Republic. In contrast, duration of residence and marital status had weak and statistically insignificant effects. Our findings highlight that pre-national forms of identification were deeply embedded in civic and institutional contexts rather than simply reflecting modern nationalist sentiments. By combining quantitative analysis with targeted archival research into individual biographies, this study demonstrates the complex interplay between institutional opportunities and personal networks in shaping migrants’ allegiances, thereby offering a nuanced historical perspective relevant to contemporary debates on civic integration.

Despite a heavy philosophical focus on issues pertaining to immigration, little discussion is taken up that examines the duties we owe to migrant children. This article works to bridge the gap between global justice literature and work on children’s autonomy and well-being. To capture what migrant children experience in the context of immigration and detention, the article examines the conditions on the island country of Nauru, where at least 222 migrant children experienced detention between the years of 2013 and 2019. Using this lived experience as an example, the article argues that we owe children specific positive duties, which are further supported by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Throughout this article, the aim is to indicate how migrant children occupy a particularly vulnerable and nonautonomous status in the context of detention. Because of this, children are owed especially weighty positive duties that are not discussed in the current global justice literature.

This article shares a unique form of public humanities created with an ethical community partnership between a university team, a community nonprofit organization, and a museum. Our podcast focuses on the stories of the staff of an organization that is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee and that resettles refugees, asylees, and immigrants. Most of the staff were immigrants themselves and shared their experiences as both outsiders and insiders in the communities that they serve. Given this historical moment of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, we aim for this podcast to serve for conversation and education about immigration not only in our local area but also in similar small cities and towns. Our podcast takes place in an upstate region of New York, approximately 200 miles outside of the city. We share our experience of putting into practice the methods and concepts drawn from public humanities, critical community engagement, ethnic studies, digital humanities, and podcast studies.

This study examines whether Americans are more supportive of immigration when migrants share their partisan preferences. To address this question, we embedded a preregistered experiment in a nationally representative survey that was fielded the week before the 2024 US Presidential Election. The main experimental treatment provided information that some immigrant groups tend to favor Donald Trump and the Republican Party. This information reduced support for immigration among Democrats and increased support for immigration among Republicans. Our findings suggest that immigrants’ political identities impact public support for immigration. They also suggest that Trump’s apparent gains among immigrant voters in the 2024 election have the potential to reduce partisan polarization over immigration in the future.

Ethno-religious nationalism has been an integral part of the Georgian identity since the country regained independence. Since the early 2000s, Georgia has had a constitutionally enshrined pro-European foreign policy, which has been reflected in a strong identification with Europe, its culture, and values. Survey data show that Georgians prefer European and Christian ethnic outgroups to Asian and Muslim ones. These factors could have explained the rise of the far right in Georgia, had Georgia experienced a wave of refugees comparable to EU states in mid-2010s. However, only few people fled from the Syrian civil war to Georgia. Nevertheless, in and around 2016, various far-right groups with a strong anti-liberal ideology appeared in the Georgian public sphere. In 2017, a far-right rally was organized, demanding that the rights of Turkish, Iranian, and Arab business owners and citizens be restricted in Georgia. This was accompanied by violent incidents involving physical abuse and property damage of non-white foreigners. The sudden rise of the far-right political organizations in Georgia gives rise to various questions: Do the far-right ideas have grassroots origins, or was the activation of the far right a top-down process? Which domestic and external factors could have contributed to these developments?