Abstract
Social tensions arising from international migration are often defined as “cultural.” Opponents of immigration from Washington to Vladivostok typically present it as a threat to the cultural identity of host societies. Public alarmism about being “swamped” or “overwhelmed” by outsiders is ascribed to concerns about racial, religious, linguistic, and cultural identities in host societies1 and with the ways these identities clash in public as “moral feelings” about social values2 or as “myth-symbol complexes” framed by elites.3 One of the best exponents of the identity threat logic has been a Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington.4 In his view, the migration of Latinos and especially Mexicans to the United States poses a threat to the survival of the United States as a nation, since the migrants’ desire to maintain distinct social identity predicates putative lack of commitment to U.S. national security interests. From this perspective, salsa outselling ketchup, more people being named Jose than Michael, and the Spanish language being increasingly spoken across America’s rural heartland are signs of a nation-splitting “social bifurcation,”5 with the West and Southwest of the United States turning into a Hispanic Quebec. Throughout Europe, too, vigorous and often fiery public debates over headscarves and crosses, cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, “bur-kinis” and Muslim hospitals, and cultural assimilation of migrants more generally have squarely framed immigration problems in cultural terms.
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Notes
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See Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 78, 242–243.
Olzak’s studies also reflect theoretical insights of ecological competition theories, notably, Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).
See Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). It also encompasses the rational choice theory emphasis on private self-interest as the determinant of political behavior: Anthony Downs, “An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy, Journal of Political Economy 65, no. 2 (1957): 135–50; Benjamin I. Page, “Elections and Social Choice: The State of the Evidence,” American Journal of Political Science 21 (1977): 639–68; and the underlying public attitudes in Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, The American Voter (New York: John Wiley, 1960); Seymor M. Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1960). One of the best exponents of the size-hostility linkage in the “realistic threat” paradigm is Susan Olzak’s analysis of the relationship between immigration patterns and interethnic conflict and violence in major American cities at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 78, 242–243; she found that change in overall immigration rates had a significant effect on antiblack violence. In Olzak’s studies, migration size is a crucial underlying component of “competitive exclusion” and intergroup violence, because size was the principal driver of socioeconomic “niche overlap and competition,” of which one of the most explicit manifestations was the physical length of “a racial job queue” (209, 210). Olzak’s studies also reflect theoretical insights of ecological competition theories, notably, Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969). Other studies, such as Mark A. Fossett and K. Jill Kiecolt, “The Relative Size of Minority Population and White Racial Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly 70 (1989): 820–35; Michael W. Giles and Kaenan Hertz, “Racial Threat and Partisan Identification,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 317–326; James Glaser, “Back to the Black Belt: Racial Environment and White Racial Attitudes in the South,” Journal of Politics 56 (1994): 21–41; Lawrence D. Bobo, “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations,” Journal of Social Issues 55 (1999): 445–72; Lawrence Bobo and Vincent L. Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 951–72; and Lincoln Quillian, “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60 (1995): 585–611 directly inferred racial threat from statistically significant relationships they found between the concentration of ethnoracial minorities and antiminority and anti-immigrant attitudes. In this sense, they linked antimigrant attitudes in theory to the same socioeconomic competition factors that would make little sense if the influx of migrants was marginal and did not tangibly affect economic conditions.
Michael W. Giles and Kaenan Hertz, “Racial Threat and Partisan Identification,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 317–326.
James Glaser, “Back to the Black Belt: Racial Environment and White Racial Attitudes in the South,” Journal of Politics 56 (1994): 21–41.
Lawrence D. Bobo, “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations,” Journal of Social Issues 55 (1999): 445–72.
Lawrence Bobo and Vincent L. Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 951–72.
Lincoln Quillian, “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60 (1995): 585–611 directly inferred racial threat from statistically significant relationships they found between the concentration of ethnoracial minorities and antiminority and anti-immigrant attitudes.
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© 2010 William Ascher and John M. Heffron
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Alexseev, M. (2010). Are Cultural Tensions “Cultural”?. In: Ascher, W., Heffron, J.M. (eds) Cultural Change and Persistence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117334_5
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