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Established and excluded?

The economic progress of immigrants can cause people to have a negative attitude towards immigration.

The economic progress of immigrants is often cited as an indicator of successful integration and is at best intended to mitigate concerns of natives regarding possible economic or welfare-related burdens from immigration. On the other hand, however, the fact that immigrants improve their social status can cause people to feel an increased "competitive pressure" and (group-related) relative disadvantage. In this sense, the fact that immigrants improve their social status can also be perceived as "zero-sum competition" (i.e., the perception that profits made by another group must be at the expense of one's own group), which can contribute to an anti-immigrant attitude and political polarization with reference immigration.

In a recent study Dr Conrad Ziller, postdoc at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology of the WiSo Faculty, examines conditions under which the progress of immigrants leads either to improved attitudes or to an increased sense of threat.

Based on the results of comparative survey data and a survey experiment, Conrad Ziller provides evidence, that people who have had negative contact experiences with immigrants in particular have reacted to the immigrants' progress with increasing feelings of threat. Changes in the social status of groups relative to one another have had a particularly strong impact on the attitudes of natives toward immigrants. Whether this means that personality dispositions play a less pronounced role with regard to anti-immigrant attitudes than previously assumed cannot yet be answered unequivocally, according to Conrad Ziller. It is clear, however, that under certain conditions xenophobic attitudes must not yet be present in the phase of the reception of immigrants, but may develop later in the course of the integration process.