Immigration and Receiving Communities: The Utility of Threats and Emotions in Predicting Action Tendencies toward Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Economic Migrants

Traditional accounts of intergroup bias often fail to consider the complexity of intergroup phenomena by insufficiently distinguishing between (a) attitudes, emotions and action tendencies, (b) classes of threat that promote intergroup bias and (c) subtle category distinctions amongst social groups. We develop a nuanced account of antimigrant bias by distinguishing between (a) manifestations of bias in emotions and action tendencies, (b) kinds of threat that drive antimigrant bias, and (c) kinds of migrant groups (economic migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers). By employing within-subjects designs in two prominent migrant-receiving countries (N-Australia = 239, N-US = 200), we find that two distinct classes of threat emerge: in-group morality threat and conflict-related threat. These threats predict specific emotion and action tendency profiles. Our findings carry important implications for the conceptualization of antimigrant bias. We also discuss implications of our findings for facilitating positive relations between receiving communities and migrants via in-group morality threat.