Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany. By Joel S. Fetzer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 272p. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Gallya Lahav, Slate University of New York at Stony Brook

Joel Fetzer is to be congratulated for a serious attempt to bring a public opinion approach to comparative immigration politics. His book represents an ambitious step toward bridging the gap between policy input and output in the immigration equation of advanced industrialized democracies. Its occasional choppy organization and underdeveloped data analysis tend to distract from the import of the work and leave the reader yearning for a deeper and more substantive discussion.

Although the title promises to tell us about public attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, the focus is on negative attitudes, or what Fetzer calls "nativism," an American term that can be equated with xenophobia in the European context (see chap. 1, note 1). Fetzer never goes beyond a broad definition of the term, but he is careful to isolate the complex renditions of this dependent variable along three dimensions: immigration affect, policy preferences, and support for anti-immigrant movements. The author's stab at compiling extensive comparative data is impressive, especially given serious constraints in obtaining cross-national data.

The exploration of causal attitudinal factors ventures into a major polemic in our understanding of tolerance of minorities and immigrants. What explains immigrant rejection and hostility-economics or culture? Attitudinal research has yielded contradictory results over ecological and contextual factors, and theoretical advances are inconclusive. Ironically, Fetzer rarely speaks directly to a whole host of budding scholarship in the immigration field, which has made significant headway on subjects he addresses. These include the rise and consolidation of the extreme Right parties, restrictive immigration policies, and immigration politics. To these studies, Fetzer's book uniquely adds rigorous empirical data testing that relies on theories exported from social psychology, economics, and cultural anthropology.

Fetzer works in "threes." He tests three theories in three separate nation-states employing three different modes of analysis: historical, time-series, and cross-sectional analyses. The first question to be asked is how the United States, a traditional country of permanent immigration, fits into a comparative scheme with such temporary labor countries as France and Germany. More...