Most research on attitude formation towards irregular migrants has taken place in Europe or North America, leaving attitudes in Australia largely under-researched. There has been some criticism concerning the lack of systematic research on immigration and public opinion in Australia and, particularly, the “limited availability of quality survey data” (Markus, 2011, p. 193) due to the
commercialisation of the leading surveys such as the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA). As Markus (2011) stresses, opinion polls in Australia provide results which are “affected by the specific wording of questions, the placement of questions within a survey, sample size and methodology, mode of administration and timing”, and, as a result, become “the plaything of the media” (p.197).
The analysis that has been conducted on attitude formation towards migrants in Australia mostly sits outside the theoretical basis of much North American and European research. McAllister (2003), for example, suggests four possible
(independent) hypotheses explaining opposition to asylum seekers (and desire for strong border security). He suggests, first, that opposition to asylum seekers is linked to attitudes towards immigration in general and to the conviction that border
protection policies assist in maintaining migration at current levels. This attitude points to misperceptions about the number of asylum seekers and Australia’s migration programs more generally (see also Pedersen et al., 2005; Verkuyten, 2004). Second, public support for border protection is tied to racial and ethnic prejudice: McAllister notes that in the early 2000s it was argued that a new influx of Middle Eastern immigrants — many of whom arrived by boat — became the centre
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of popular prejudice owing to their distinctive culture and religion (2003, p. 455). Third, voters support strong border protection policies believing asylum seekers arriving by boat to be “queue jumpers” who have violated the normal and fair procedures which are in place to ensure the orderly migration of a quota of asylum seekers to Australia. Fourth, McAllister suggests that Australians’ strong sense of national identity may be a factor behind their desire for border protection:
It is clear from the popular reaction to the asylum-seekers that many
Australians regarded these unauthorised arrivals as an affront to their sense of national pride. National identity is therefore a potential explanation for public attitudes to asylum-seekers (2003, p. 456).
These four hypotheses were measured against a dependent variable concerning whether boats carrying asylum seekers should be turned back – a question that has appeared in several iterations of the AES (Bean et al., 2004; Bean et al., 2005; Bean et al., 2014a; McAllister et al., 2011).
McAllister found that the key factors, in order of prevalence, that influence attitudes to asylum seekers are:
1. a general desire to reduce levels of immigration 2. national identity (in the form of national pride)
3. procedural fairness (respect for authority, rather than satisfaction with democracy)
4. racial prejudice (adapted from McAllister, 2003, pp. 456-457). McAllister’s 2003 article is an example of research which is wholly Australian focused. Although the article sits outside theories that have been developed in other contexts internationally, it makes a valuable contribution to understanding attitudes in Australia (especially relating to prejudice and threats).
Apart from the above mentioned key factors, McAllister found that “the strong link between asylum-seekers and immigration is notable, raising as it does popular concerns about migrants undermining material standards of living” (2003, p.
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456). This point raises the question whether economic conditions may affect attitudes towards asylum seekers in Australia. Given that economic concerns have already been shown to have a questionable role in relation to attitudes towards immigration (Fetzer, 2000), and bearing in mind that there is no consensus as to the significance of economic factors in the literature, further investigation into this aspect of attitude formation is warranted.
Not all of McAllister’s findings can be tested for the whole period 2001 to 2013. For example, national identity has been inconsistently measured in the AES. Moreover, while there are indicators on racism and perceptions of racism in the community, racism warrants a comprehensive investigation and branches into an additional body of literature that is beyond the scope of this research (Berg, 2013b).
On the subject of the 2001 federal election, McAllister concluded that asylum seekers alone did not cost the Australian Labor Party the 2001 election. In his
analysis, he comes to the conclusion that terrorism in connection to the issue of border protection were the most important issues in swaying voters (McAllister, 2003, p. 431). Recent research has also argued that tough rhetoric on asylum seekers has a questionable role in winning votes (Lewis & Woods, 2014a), unlike the threat of terrorism. Media commentators, however, argue that ‘boat people rhetoric’ in the 2001 election had lasting political consequences for both major parties: for example, Crabb argues that the 2001 loss shaped the Labor Party’s subsequent cautious
behaviour towards the asylum seeker issue, while the Liberal Party saw the issue as a path to electoral success (see Cassidy, 2010; Crabb, 2010, p. 60; Kelly, 2009, p. 617).
Along similar lines of investigation to McAllister (2003), Lamb (2011) considers attitudes towards asylum seekers in Australia around the 2001 and 2010
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federal elections. Lamb argues that there is continuity of social characteristics — including education, occupation and gender — which predispose individuals to oppose asylum seekers and that favouring immigration more broadly and having a sense of procedural fairness are the most salient factors associated with favourable attitudes towards asylum seekers (Lamb, 2011, pp. 105-106). Importantly, Lamb also concludes that because these explanatory variables were similar in 2001 and 2010, attitudes towards asylum seekers are “deeply held and not subject to radical fluctuations” (2011, p. 106).
Misperceptions, misunderstanding, and lack of knowledge about asylum seekers likely play a part in the formation of attitudes. To some extent, attitudes are based on the information individuals receive mitigated by individual interpretation (Chong & Druckman, 2007a, 2007b; de Vreese et al., 2011; Druckman et al., 2010; Druckman et al., 2013; Dunaway et al., 2010; Lahav & Courtemanche, 2012; Pietsch & Marotta, 2009). Pedersen et al., for example, found that negative attitudes towards asylum seekers in Australia are strongly related to false beliefs, defined as “the acceptance of certain incorrect facts” (Pedersen et al., 2005, p. 151), likely owing to few respondents having actual knowledge of asylum seekers and others basing their opinions on hearsay (2005, p. 156). It may be the case that information concerning asylum seekers and immigrants is engineered, or framed, at the political level to avoid specifics or any information concerning individuals that may arouse sympathy. On this topic, experimental research has shown that priming survey respondents with personal information about immigrants can result in more favourable attitudes being expressed by respondents (Bittner & Tremblay, 2011).
The role of misperceptions in attitude formation has been tested both internationally and in Australia. In the Netherlands, for example, Verkuyten (2004)
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suggested that negative reactions to asylum seekers are associated with the
perception that they are actually economic migrants intent on bypassing established procedures and regulations in order to migrate. At the same time, Verkuyten (2004) argued that individuals perceived as “genuine” political refugees attracted sympathy. Similarly, following a survey designed to identify psychological motivators, Louis et al. (2007) suggest that in Australia:
citizens’ willingness to restrict the access of asylum seekers to their nation and its resources is predicted well by models of intergroup hostility and prejudice [...] procedural and distributive fairness concerns contribute uniquely to predicting social attitudes and action to asylum seekers, as well as partially mediating the effects of norms, legitimacy, and threatening intergroup relations (2007, p. 66).
Esses et al. (2008) makes a similar argument noting some people in Australia:
perceive that many refugee claimants are immoral individuals who are falsely claiming refugee status in order to gain entry into desirable host nations. These perceptions may evoke the dehumanization of refugees in general, such that refugees may be perceived as less than human and thus not worthy of fair treatment. This may result not only in hostility, but also in
unfavourable attitudes toward refugee claimants and toward current refugee policies (2008, p. 5).
Clearly, many of the theories dealing with attitude formation incorporate the locally- born population’s perceptions of asylum seekers — most commonly in relation to perceived threats.
The datasets that I have chosen to combine and use do not include measures specifically related to knowledge concerning immigration – be that about regular or irregular arrivals. They do, however, contain many useful measures, including a measure of political knowledge, which will be introduced and discussed in Chapter 3. However, in order to probe the function of specific knowledge in the case of attitudes towards asylum seekers arriving by boat, I will investigate the knowledge
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of university students concerning asylum issues in Australia in order to determine if the students have, firstly, accurate perceptions of asylum issues and, secondly, whether higher levels of knowledge concerning asylum issues correlate with favourable attitudes towards asylum seekers.