Guarding the gates, preserving the rights Public perception, emotions, and attitudes toward immigrants

How do people decide which immigrants should be admitted to a country? Once admitted, what rights for immigrants does the public support, and to what extent? To what degree and under which conditions are immigrants perceived as equally deserving of welfare provisions as native-born citizens? These questions lie at the heart of public debates and political contestation. Against this backdrop, this dissertation turns to the “invisible borders” of the public mind to examine the drivers of exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants across both entry and post-entry policy domains. Moving beyond conventional explanations centered on zero-sum material competition, it focuses on how such attitudes are shaped by normative beliefs about who is seen as entitled to national resources and privileges, perceived violations of these group-based entitlements, and distinct affective reactions to migration.
Drawing on survey data and experimental evidence from Europe and Türkiye, the findings show that when group entitlements are perceived as threatened or violated, native-born citizens are more likely to “guard the gates” of admission and “preserve rights” for their own group. Emotions play a central role in this mechanism: anger and compassion, both closely tied to normative evaluations, are more strongly associated with exclusionary attitudes than anxiety, though in divergent ways. Building on this insight, this dissertation contributes to debates on anti-immigrant backlash, welfare chauvinism, and rising nativist politics by demonstrating that compassion, often overlooked in the literature, constitutes a key affective dynamic in shaping and potentially reducing exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants.