Queen Bee Immigrant: The effects of status perceptions on immigration attitudes

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This work examines a seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in many Western democracies, whereby (parts of) the immigrant population supports anti-immigration policies. I propose that relative status deprivation, that is, the degree to which a given national/ethnic group is ranked low in the ethnic status hierarchy of the host country, has a negative impact on the attitudes of its members toward even lower-ranked groups. In an experiment, participants with an immigration background residing in Germany (N=1,159) receive either a positive or a negative evaluation of their national/ethnic in-group, while holding fixed evaluations of several outgroups, as evaluated by a group of native-majority (German) participants. Receiving a negative evaluation of their in-group leads participants to express more negative views of the refugees from the Middle East and to significantly decrease willingness to donate to an organization supporting refugees, while not altering their generosity in a general setting unrelated to immigration.