The Factors That Affect Attitudes Towards Immigrants In Turkey

THE FACTORS THAT AFFECT ATTITUDES TOWARDS IMMIGRANTS

IN TURKEY

FURKAN TEMÜR

ABSTRACT

This paper studies attitudes against immigrants in Turkey. These variables used are as income,

born in Turkey, education level, importance of religion, gender. Quantitative and qualitative

variables are applied in this model of regression. All these results indicated that these used

variables identified above have important influence over the behaviors of local people towards

immigrants. Briefly, whether people are looking friendly to migrated people or not is analyzed.

Most of native people look negatively to them.

Furkan TEMÜR

1

Introduction

For the migrant, migration can have one of several reasons: professional purpose like

long-term mission abroad and studies such as in health issues. Because; when they migrate they

have not social securities in that country. Another one is due to political issues. Political

persecutions lead to flee of refugees to other countries. In case of war in the country of origin,

people migrate to other countries due to security issues. Living in poor countries has also forced

people to seek a better life in richer countries (possibly temporarily) or it is personal choice that

desiring to move to another country for tasting other countries’ culture. For states; immigration

provides workforce to immigrated people. However, the illegal immigration goes beyond the

wishes of the country of arrival. Today, migration flows are directed both to developing countries

and to developed countries: from as a developed country to another or from a developing country

to another developing country. Right of immigrants is depending on law or viewpoint of the host

country and they are mostly seen in EU countries. Briefly, which variables affect people’s

attitudes against immigration will be analyzed. In the literature review, most general factors

which have an impact on behaviors to immigrants will be focused. After literature review, in data

and variables part which variables used will be described. Finally, econometric model and its

results will be interpreted.

Literature Review

This article analyzes people’s attitudes toward immigrants in Turkey. Many researches

have been done on this issue. How immigrants affect attitudes of people will be researched. In

this section; I review some papers on the main topic that is which factors affect attitudes of

people towards immigrants or immigration will be analyzed.

Furkan TEMÜR

2

Paas & Halapuu (2012) analyzed the relationship between people and immigrants to

understand views to immigrants in European countries. They used data from “European Social

Survey” (2008). The research is about Europe's behaviors and it also includes examples of its

various inhabitants. They used “cross-section” data with has almost 28.000 respondents. They

though that if a country has a high unemployment rate, then there will be higher “anti-immigrant”

attitudes. When labor supply rises because of immigration, competition on the labor market gets

harder. For instance, wages of local people diminish in skilled groups. Since migrants are seen as

low-talented employments, low-skilled workers are more prone to act in a hostile way to

immigrants. They concluded that people who have a high education level act more permissively

than others. Higher income people are classes are also more tolerant toward immigrants. They

also found that gender difference is not significant in the attitudes towards immigration. People

with higher education, higher income level, ethnic minority groups, and people with positive

thinking about their expectation of the future, are very tolerant toward migrants.

O'Connell (2011) studied attitudes of high-skilled natives towards high skilled migrants.

The data of European Social Survey in 2002 were used to measure people’s behaviors. The main

goal of this study is to investigate connection between immigrants and natives’ skill levels by

country. Briefly, he found that Europeans have not positive look on immigrants due to ethnicity

difference such as culture. For example; high skilled Irish people do not look positively to

immigrants. This is measured by asking a question which is “to what extent do you think

[country] should allow people of the same race or ethnic group as most [country] people to come

and live here”. Respondent can answer as “allow many immigrants to live in the country, allow

some, allow few and allow none”. The mean response is 1.8 and 2.8, respectively. To explain; if

Furkan TEMÜR

3

value is approaches to 3 then it means that people are allowing only few immigrants. Moreover;

high skilled migrants are not a threat for high skilled native workers.

Hainmueller and Hiscox (2007) investigated individual attitudes toward immigrants. They

used data from the 2003 “European Social Survey”. They found that people with high education

level have positive sight towards immigrants. More educated people think that immigration

contributes to the “host economy” and immigrants are the suppliers of low skilled labor.

However, native people who work in blue collar jobs are not satisfied with migrants. They

thought that immigrants increase the supply of low skilled labor and decrease the wage of native

low skilled workers. They concluded that people with high education level are more favorable to

immigrants “regardless of where migrants come from”. Card, Dustmann, and Preston (2007) also

investigated attitudes toward immigration in three aspects: “labor concerns, welfare concerns and

cultural concerns”. Their research is based on the data from “British Social Attitudes Survey”

(1983 to 1990). They found that more educated people have a positive look on immigrants. In

addition to this, views on immigrant people are also effective in labor market. For instance,

manual workers who are less skilled are more affected by low skilled immigration. Therefore,

immigration causes job substitution of local people and these workers can be an inconvenience to

the government. They also argued that Christian people are against immigration whereas people

from other religions or no religion do not look negatively to immigrants. The reason of hostility

can come from “orthodoxy” but, it is difficult to determine whether it is decisive reason or not.

Rourke and Sinnot (2004) studied “the determinants of individual attitudes towards

immigration”. They have three conclusions; the first one is about “nationalist sentiments”, the

second one is related to skill levels of workers, and the last one is related to non-economic

factors. Firstly, people with strong nationalist attitudes have an aggressive behavior to word

Furkan TEMÜR

4

immigrants. The reason is that they do not like people who are not part of their nation.

Furthermore, in rich countries, high skilled workers have attitudes toward immigration while

unskilled laborers support anti-immigration by laws. They used data from the “International

Social Survey Programme (ISSP)”.

Binatli and Akdede (2014) focused on “social status of migrants” in Turkey. The research

has been done in İzmir. Social status is a set of rights and obligations under the socially

determined values that occur within a cultural group. Social status can be observed by looking at

people’s education, job status and income. (as cited in Brown et al., 1988; McLeod and

Nonnemaker, 1999; Lee et al., 2009). High educational level of the people brings high salary

expectations and it also shortens the period of unemployment (as cited in data from Finland,

Ollikainen, 2003). Moreover, there are big differences between natives and migrants. That is to

say; studies show that natives earn higher wages than migrants. Unemployment is also increases

the possibility of migrating to other countries. (as cited in Ruhm, 1991; Machin and Manning,

1999; Arulampalam, 2001; Arulampalam et al., 2000). The data used is from “the Izmir Labor

Market Household Survey”. They used “the first level coding of ISCO-88” to measure job status.

They found that women and uneducated people have a higher probability of having lower level of

occupations. Therefore, low level of education decrease the level of profession. Because of this;

women are also forced to immigrate to other countries or cities. Binatli and Akdede (2014) are

measured income effect on immigrants. They concluded that men earn more than women.

Therefore, there is gender discrimination in “İzmir labor market”.

Spenkuch (2014) investigated whether people believe that immigration increase crime

rates or not. He mentioned that Americans claim immigration increases crime rates. Moreover, he

also mentioned that immigration decreases wage and employment rates due to an increase of

Furkan TEMÜR

5

supply in the labor market (as cited in Borjas et al. 2010). The data of “decadal panel of county

level observations running from 1980 to 2000” is used in his study. He found that there is a

significant effect of immigration on crime rates. One of them is “population effect” that increases

crimes. For instance; 10 % increase in migrants leads to an increase in crime rates of 1.2 %.

Furthermore; most of the immigrants are males and their ages are between 15 and 35 (as cited in

U.S. Census Bureau, 2009). He shows that 1 % increase in total population increases crime rates

by 1.415 %. Additionally, 1 % increases in age lead to increase crime rates by 0.012 %.

Migration or immigrants have faced unfavorable attitudes from native people all over the

world. Esses, Jackson and Armstrong (1998), argued that discrimination and prejudice rely on

intergroup attitudes and behavior. They analyzed the “Eurobarometer” (1998) which is a large

survey carried out by the European Economic Community (EEC). It is based on whether or not

competition for resource estimated approaches against migration. Realistic group conflict theory

explains competition for resources and conflicting group have obtain more than others. The

theory means that immigrant people accumulate source more than natives. For example; they can

save their money which is earned in abroad. They examined the relation between unemployment

and attitudes against immigrants. They found that unemployment rate is associated with people’s

behaviors toward immigration. Their respondents of survey believed that unemployment is due to

migration to the country and this should be decreased (as cited in Espenshade & Hempstead,

1996).

Martinez and Lee (2000) argued that the society has mainly a negative attitude toward

migration in America (in 20th

century). In other words, the public has unsuitable views on

migrated people who are in a transition from one country to another country (as cited by Rita

Simon 1985, 1987, 1993). As a result of this, people who migrate are exposed to discrimination,

Furkan TEMÜR

6

especially to black workers. Additionally, Martinez and Lee are showed that there is a higher

ratio of immigrant people who has committed crimes than natives. They used data from “U.S.

Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service (1997, 1987)”. They found that

immigrants have adaptation problems such as poverty and racial heterogeneity which is diversity

in the society. These factors play an important role on criminal activities. Kubrin and Ishizawa

(2012) argued that immigrants have a lower tendency to commit crimes than natives. On the

other hand, immigration is related with cultural differences among people such as language

mismatch. Immigrants also want to work with people who are from their own folk and ethnicity

in other countries. Therefore natives do not have positive view and include immigrant people in

their activities. They used data from the “National Neighborhood Crime Study” (NNCS). It

consists of 9.593 household that are located in U.S cities. They used exploratory spatial data

analysis (ESDA) which is “a tool to examine broader spatial patterns of interest across

geographic areas of different sizes”. In their case, they investigated the Chicago and Los Angeles.

They found that Chicago’s and Los Angeles’ crime rates are 8.7 and 4.3 respectively.

Unemployment rate of these cities are same (40 %). These are descriptive statistic results. If we

come to regression results, they concluded that locations of Chicago where their immigrant level

is high have higher crime rates. Migrants are concentrated in areas where the crime rate is 19.8

However; migrant density is negatively related to crime rates in Los Angeles. That is to say, “a

unit increase in immigrant concentration” decreases crime rates by about 10 percent. Another

variable, young male rate (25 %) is also negatively associated with crime rates. But, percentage

of black people is positively related to crime levels (12 %).

Furkan TEMÜR

7

Data and Variables

I use the European Values Study, 2008 (EVS 2008) is used. It is a long survey that

examines how Europeans think about social topics such as religion, job, family, politics and other

people around the world. I will use data for Turkey (2008). I use quantitative and qualitative

variables in my regression. In table-1; I present the summary statistics of the variables that I used

in the econometric analysis. The mean of attitudes toward immigrants which I used a dependent

variable, is 4. The average of the respondent’s age surveyed is approximately 40 years old and

percentage of male is about 44. Moreover, 61 % of people have low education. Except age and

dependent variable, the other variables are qualitative variables.

The first variable is “paid employment” which is a dummy variable that takes value 1 if

people work 30 hours a week or more. Secondly, “born in Turkey” is a dummy variable that

shows whether the respondent is a native or an immigrant. The income level is reflected by three

variables. Low income and high income variable represent that people have income up to 1000

TL and above 2501 TL, respectively. The level of education dummy is labeled by three dummies:

as primary, secondary and high education. Then, male is used as a dummy reflections the sex of

the respondent. Finally, three variables are included about the people’s views about religion.

Attending religious services is also a dummy variable that measure the frequency of attending to

religious services. Second one is importance of God and it is also a dummy variable. People were

asked as do you think God is important to you. The last one is importance of religion and

individuals answered as it is important or not important. All of these are used as independent

variables. As a dependent variable, I have used means of variables that is related to attitudes

against immigrants. I created this variable by taking averages of “immigrants take away jobs

from Turkish people, immigrants undermine country’s cultural life, immigrants increase crime

Furkan TEMÜR

8

problems, immigrants are a strain on welfare system and immigrants will become a threat to

society”. All of the variables that are mentioned above are shown in Table-1 clearly and in a

detailed way as a summary statistics of variables.

Econometric Model and Results

To estimate the attitudes of local people towards immigrants, Ordinary least squares

(OLS) is used. I determined my model as follows:

In the equation above Y is dependent variable and refers to attitudes toward immigrates.

For example; immigrants that effect Turkey’s cultural life, jobs, crime rates, society and welfare

system. P refers to people work 30 hours a week or more. Unpaid employment is reference

category which working less than 30 hours for a week. T is the dummy of “born in turkey”. I1

and I2 are levels of income dummies. I1 denotes low level of income and I2 denotes high income.

In this case, middle income level is in the reference category. E1 and E2 are the education

dummies. They are referring to high and primary education respectively. Secondary education

was not included. M is the gender dummy and refers to male. Female is the reference category.

Furthermore, A is the ages of individuals. R1, R2 and G are about people’s religion views and

behaviors. R1 is referring to religion is important. R2 is the people that attend religious services

mostly and less attending to religious services is reference category. G refers to God is important

to individuals and God is not important to them is not included. Omitted variables are also shown

in table-4. Lastly, is the error term. Those are the explanations of the regression model that I

used. Table- 2 shows the regression results of the model described above. If we look at the

Furkan TEMÜR

9

coefficient of people who work 30 hours a week or more, high income, high level education,

primary education, male, age and attending religious services mostly, they are all negative except

for religious services. However, they are not statistically significant. Therefore they are not

meaningful and we cannot interpret them. The coefficient of born in Turkey is negative and

significant. We can interpret it as follows: local people have less favorable attitudes toward

immigrants than those who are not Turkish. The coefficient of low income is positive and

significant. People with low income have more favorable attitudes towards immigrants compared

to individuals who are in middle income category. The coefficient of importance of religion is

positive meaning that: people who say that religion is important have more favorable views of

immigrants compared to people who think religion is not important. Moreover, if we look at

coefficient of God is important, it is negative and statistically significant. Therefore, people who

think that God is important, have less favorable attitudes against immigrants compared to people

who say God is not important to them. This situation can be seen as a contradictory but

importance of religion is different because, even a person has not any religious beliefs, can say

that religion is important.

Lastly, we should also look at if there is multicollinearity or not. We can see the VIF

values from Table-3 to look multicollinearity. VIF values measures the amount of

multicollinearity that exists in a regression and it is a problem in terms of interpreting

independent variables. So that, there is no multicollinearity because, they are not significantly

high. I also looked heteroskedasticity by Breusch and Pagan test and there is no

heteroskedasticity (P-value: 0.0993).

Furkan TEMÜR

10

Conclusion

To conclude, the factors that affect attitudes toward immigration are studied in this paper.

Generally, Turkish people have negative attitudes against immigrants in Turkey. Turkish people

Turkey may think that immigrants steal their jobs and also that they cannot adopt easily other

country’s culture easily. Immigrant people also want to work with their same folks because, when

they settle in another country, they feel close to their citizens. Although employment status of

people is insignificant in Turkey, unemployment rate also affects the behaviors towards

immigrants. If it is high, local people have an “anti-immigrant” behavior to immigrant people.

Americans also claimed that immigrants increase crime rates, as in Turkey. Another argument is

education which is not significant in my model. However, education affects attitudes against

immigrants in most countries because; high educated people have positive views to immigrants.

Gender is also not significant in other countries and. That is to say; gender of respondents does

not matter in this study. Additionally, age is not meaningful in Turkey whereas it differs in

European countries. For instance, old people look negatively to immigrants. It can be due to their

past events in their life. Actually, most of the variables are insignificant in Turkey. It might be

due to socio economic conditions in Turkey. These include quality of education, income level

and job status of people in Turkey. Most of countries that are analyzed in literature review are

developed countries. Therefore, they are more tolerant to immigrant people.

Furkan TEMÜR

11

Reference List

Binatli, A., & Akdede, S. (2014). The Social Status of Migrants in Turkey. International Journal

Of Manpower, 35(1-2), 118-132.

Card, D., & Dustmann, C., & Preston, I. (2007). Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to

Immigration. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.

Esses, V., Jackson, L., & Armstrong, T. (1998). Intergroup Competition and Attitudes Toward

Immigrants and Immigration: An Instrumental Model of Group Conflict. Journal of Social Issues,

699-724.

Hainmueller, J., & Hiscox, M. (2007). Educated Preferences: Explaining Attitudes Toward

Immigration In Europe. International Organization.

Kubrin, C. E., & Ishizawa, H. (2012). Why Some Immigrant Neighborhoods Are Safer Than

Others: Divergent Findings from Los Angeles and Chicago. Annals Of The American Academy

Of Political And Social Science, 641148-173.

Martinez, R., & Lee, M. T. (2000). On Immigration and Crime. THE NATURE OF CRIME:

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE, 1, 458-524.

O'Connell, M. (2011). How Do High-Skilled Natives View High-Skilled Immigrants? A Test of

Trade Theory Predictions. European Journal Of Political Economy, 27(2), 230-240.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2010.11.002

Orourke, K., & Sinnott, R. (2004). The Determinants Of Individual Attitudes Towards

Immigration. European Journal of Political Economy, 838-861.

Furkan TEMÜR

12

Paas, T., & Halapuu, V. (2012). Attitudes towards immigrants and the integration of ethnically

diverse societies. Norface Migration, 23, 1-19.

Reprinted from Focus, newsletter of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison, [31, 1], © [2009] by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin.

Spenkuch, J. L. (2014). Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Crime. American Law And

Economics Review, 16(1), 177-219

Furkan TEMÜR

13

Appendix

Table-1: Summary Statistics of the Variables

Table- 2: OLS Regression Results

Variables Coefficients Std. Err. t P>t

People who work 30 hours a week or more -0,07 0,0930 -0.76 0.449

Born in Turkey -1,53 0,3426 4,47 0.000*

Low income 0,28 0,0894 3,16 0.002*

High income -0,03 0,2661 -0.12 0.902

High level education -0,14 0,1395 -0.99 0.324

Primary education 0,09 0,0924 0.99 0.322

Male -0,01 0,0936 -0.15 0.884

Age -0,02 0,0026 -1.16 0.248

Religion is important 0,16 0,0738 2,19 0.028*

Attending religious services mostly 0,06 0,0881 0.65 0.518

God is important -0,38 0,1591 -2.38 0.017*

Constant 2,77 0,4264 6,49 0.000

R-squared = 0.0307

*: P<0.05

Variables

Number of

Observations Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

Attitudes towards immigrants 2311 4,023 1,68 1 10 People who work 30 hours a week or

more 2379 0,271 0,44 0 1

Born in Turkey 2384 1,011 0,10 1 2

Low level income 2198 0,279 0,44 0 1

Middle level income 2198 0,260 0,43 0 1

High level income 2198 0,019 0,13 0 1

High level education 2380 0,905 0,29 0 1

Secondary education 2380 0,287 0,45 0 1

Primary level education 2380 0,381 0,48 0 1

Male 2384 0,443 0,49 0 1

Age 2327 39,58 15,38 15 88

Religion is important 2373 0,94 0,55 0 1

God is important 2359 0,94 0,23 0 1

Attending religious services mostly 2338 0,37 0,48 0 1

Furkan TEMÜR

14

Table- 3: VIF values of variables

Variables VIF 1/VIF

Male 1,69 0,59

Primary education 1,57 0,63

Attending religious services mostly 1,44 0,69

People who work 30 hours a week or more 1,30 0,76

Low income 1,28 0,78

High level education 1,26 0,79

Age 1,22 0,81

Religion is important 1,17 0,85

God is important 1,12 0,89

High income 1,09 0,91

Born in Turkey 1,03 0,97

Mean VIF 1,29

Table-4: Omitted Variables from the econometric model

Variables

Attending religious services rarely

Not born in Turkey

Middle income

Secondary education

Female

Religion is not important

Not attending religious services

God is not important