Does health affect attitudes towards immigration? 1

This paper examines whether people’s health affects their attitudes towards immigration. I first discuss various mechanisms through which health might affects attitudes towards immigration, including competition for scarce resources, channels related to subjective wellbeing, and behavioural immune system response. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1999-2020) and the European Social Survey (2002-2021), I find that poorer subjective health, as well as longstanding physical and mental health conditions, are strong predictors of anti-immigration sentiment. To understand what is driving these results, I explore the interplay between health and 1) individual perceptions of immigrants’ use of public services, 2) subjective wellbeing, and 3) COVID-19 related variables, including testing positive, as well as identify health conditions and wellbeing dimensions that are most strongly correlated with the anti-immigration sentiment. Overall, this study reveals physical and mental health as important determinants of attitudes toward immigration and highlights an overlooked dimension of the growing migration-wellbeing literature.


INTRODUCTION
The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, putting an unprecedented strain on health services and forcing governments to introduce lockdowns.
One of the insidious effects of the pandemic was the rise in hate crime against immigrants: as the virus was first reported in China, people projected their Covid-related fears and frustrations onto Chinese or those believed to be of the Chinese descent (Brussels Times, 2020;Liu, 2020;Mercer, 2020;Rich, 2020).While the effect of the Coronavirus outbreak on anti-immigration sentiment and Sinophobia has now been well documented in the literature (Gray and Hansen, 2021;Reny and Barreto, 2022;Schumann and Moore, 2023;Viladrich, 2021), surprisingly little remains known about the broader effects of health on attitudes towards immigration.This study fills this knowledge gap, by, first, discussing various theoretical channels through which people's health and health-related concerns might affect attitudes towards immigration and then testing empirically the link between the two groups of variables in Europe.
I hypothesise that individual health may affect attitudes towards immigration through three broad channels: 1) perceived competition for scarce resources, whereby people in poorer health may perceive themselves to be in competition with immigrants over access to limited health services; 2) well-being effects and affect misattribution, whereby health-induced changes in emotional well-being get projected onto immigrants, and 3) the behavioural immune system response, where the threats of pandemics, such as Covid-19, trigger aversive emotional responses, including outgroup hostility.To test for the effects of health on attitudes towards immigration, I use the individual-level data spanning two decades  from two large surveys: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the European Social Survey (ESS).The longitudinal setting of SOEP offers an opportunity to control for unobserved respondent heterogeneity, effectively allowing to determine how, for the same individuals, changes in health status relate to changes in attitudes immigration.The ESS, best described as repeated-cross-sectional survey, provides access to a large pool of respondents from more than 20 European countries and, among other things, allows to check if any relationships observed in the Germany panel apply to a wider European context.
Empirical results confirm a strong association between individual health and attitudes towards immigration: people reporting poorer health and lower health satisfaction are less favourable to immigration.This relationship is observed in both between-and within-person analyses.Controlling for the measures of subjective wellbeing, perceptions of the immigrants' use of public services, and perceptions of the state of public health services, the association between health and attitudes gets smaller, implying that the health effect partially (but not fully) operates through these factors.Among the pandemic-related factors, vaccine hesitancy, beliefs about Covid-19 conspiracies and dissatisfaction with the way country coped with the pandemic are associated with more anti-immigration attitudes, while the belief of having had Covid-19 is, intriguingly, associated with more positive stance towards immigration.
This study contributes to several strands of literature.First, it highlights physical health as an overlooked individual-level determinant of attitudes towards immigration, thus adding to the broad social science literature on what shapes attitudes towards immigration in receiving countries (see e.g.Fussell (2014) and Hainmueller and Hopkins (2014) for cross-disciplinary overviews and Mayda (2006), Facchini and Mayda (2009) and Margaryan et al. (2021) for contributions in economics).Second, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on wellbeing and migration (see e.g.Hendriks and Burger (2021) for an overview).While this literature has started to consider the effects of subjective well-being on attitudes towards immigrants (Bazán-Monasterio et al., 2021;Korol and Bevelander, 2023;Tenenbaum et al., 2018;Welsch et al., 2021), an important (and related) manifestation of wellbeingphysical as well as mental healthand its effect on attitudes towards immigration have so far remained overlooked; this paper fills this knowledge gap.Finally, an emerging and related to this paper strand of literature examines how attitudes towards immigration affect physical health (Pinillos-Franco and Kawachi, 2022a;Pinillos-Franco and Kawachi, 2022b).A fundamental difference is that the present paper starts from a theoretical premise that health affects attitudes towards immigration, rather than the other way around.
The remainder of the paper is organised as follows.Section 2 reviews the theoretical channels and related literature.Section 3 introduces the data and methodology.Section 4 presents and discusses the results, followed by a conclusion.

THEORETICAL CHANNELS AND RELATED LITERATURE
There are at least three broad reasons why people's health and health-related factors would affect their attitudes towards immigration: 1) perceived competition with immigrants over scarce resources, 2) indirect wellbeing-related effect and affect misattribution, and 3) behavioural response to infection threats.This section provides a brief description of each channel.

Perceived competition with immigrants over scarce resources
The Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979;Tajfel and Turner, 1986)a wellestablished theoretical framework in the field of Social Psychology and broader social sciencesposits that people create mental "in-groups" and "out-groups", by categorising themselves and others into various social groups based on shared characteristics, such as ethnicity and nationality, and show favouritism towards members of their own in-group and prejudice and discrimination towards members of out-groups.The theory further contends that the context in which people find themselves can affect their social identity and sense of belonging.Specifically, in situations where groups are in competition for resources, people are more likely to identify with, and show favouritism towards, their in-group, and to view members of out-groups as a threat, resulting in negative attitudes and behaviour towards members of out-groups.
People with poor health will rely more heavily on public health services to receive medical care.Often, there may be limited resources available to provide these services, particularly in areas with high demand or limited funding.In such situations, people, and especially those in poorer health, may perceive or assume that immigrants are putting additional strain on these resources.Such perceived competition with immigrantsmembers of the "out-group"over limited health services will fuel negative attitudes towards immigration.
Note that a view that immigrants are putting an extra strain on health services may contradict the evidence, which, if anything, would suggest that immigrants improve the host countries' health provision (see, e.g., Giuntella et al. (2018) on the beneficial effect of immigration on reducing NHS waiting times in the UK) and that immigrants, generally being healthier than natives (Constant et al., 2018), use host countries' medical services disproportionately less (Sarría-Santamera et al., 2016). 3There is, of course, no guarantee that people are familiar with this evidence or, if familiar, would accordingly adjust their perceptions about immigrants use of public services.Furthermore, the negative perceptions of immigration putting an extra strain on medical services could be fuelled by the news outlets portraying immigrants in unfavourable light (Matthews, 2017;Migration Watch UK, 2021;The Telegraph, 2016).

+ competition over other social benefits (not only health) as people in poor health
disproportionately rely on these too.

Indirect well-being effects and affect misattribution
A growing literature in Social and Political Psychology offers a theoretical framework and evidence that emotions and psychological well-being shape political tolerance, openmindedness and attitudes towards outgroups, such as immigrants and refugees (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014;Tenenbaum et al., 2018;Korol and Bevelander, 2023;Welsch et al., 2021.)This approach argues that negative life experiences worsen attitudes toward outgroups, while positive experiences and greater psychological wellbeing have an opposite effect (Korol and Bevelander, 2023).The underlying mechanisms include affect misattribution, whereby our judgements, beliefs and orientations, especially when they concern unfamiliar groups, are informed by unrelated feelings (Tenenbaum et al., 2018).
Experimental evidence shows that incidental emotions, such as happiness and fear, affect attitudes towards asylum seekers (Tenenbaum et al., 2018), and a growing literature suggests that greater life satisfactiona key manifestation of subjective well-beinggoes hand in hand with more positive stance towards immigrants (Bazán-Monasterio et al., 2021;Korol and Bevelander, 2023;Welsch et al., 2021).
The link between poor health and low subjective well-being is well-documented (Diener et al., 2018;Ngamaba et al., 2017), with the effect of poor health and health conditions on subjective well-being assumed to be working through, for example, the poor-health-induced negative emotions, such as pain, discomfort and stress; limitations that impact people's ability to engage in daily activities and socialise with others; and reduced sense of control and independence as people in poor health rely on others for assistance with daily activities or medical care.If poor health adversely affects subjective well-being and subjective well-being adversely affects attitudes towards immigration, poor health will indirectly make people more anti-immigrationthrough changes in subjective wellbeing.

Behavioural responses to threats of infection
The "behavioural immune system" hypothesis posits that people facing pathogen threats adopt social behaviours to avoid pathogens -a psychological system that works alongside immunological defences (Schaller, 2011;Schaller at el., 2023).During times of increased threat from pathogens (such as the Covid-19 epidemic), the behavioural immune system can affect social attitudes and social behaviour, including stigma, prejudice, and attitudes towards outgroups, such as immigrants (Freitag and Hofstetter, 2022;Schaller et al., 2023).
This may be due to the perception that immigrants carry pathogens from their home countries which would explain the rise in Sinophobia at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemicor through the pandemic-triggered aversive emotional responses (fear, anger, dislike, disgust), which in turn foster outgroup hostility (Freitag and Hofstetter, 2022).
The recent contributions that have empirically examined the relationship between Covidrelated concerns and attitudes toward immigration (Freitag and Hofstetter, 2022;Pickup et al., 2021;Reny and Barreto, 2022) as well as sought to provide a direct test for the behavioural immune system hypothesis in the context of Covid-19 (Freitag and Hofstetter, 2022) have indeed revealed a strong relationship between the two groups of variables, even if important differences emerged regarding people's political attitudes, types of emotion generated by the pandemic, and the origin of immigrants.Interestingly, Heizmann and Huth-Stöckle (2022) also revealed that higher Covid-19 deaths at the country level were associated with more positive attitudes towards immigration (or more precisely, less blaming of immigrants for the pandemic), which the authors explain by the suppression of the salience of migration as the pandemic hit.

Hypotheses
The discussion above leads us to the following hypotheses: All rounds of the survey include information on both attitudes towards immigration and general health, complemented by specialised question on health in specific rounds, as well as questions on COVID-19 in the round 2020/21.

Dependent variable(s): attitudes towards immigration
I use the following SOEP question to capture attitudes towards immigration: "How is it with the following topicimmigration to Germany -do you have worries about it?",with possible answers "no worries", "some worries" and "big worries".The answers are assigned values 1 to 3, with higher values corresponding to greater worries. 4ll ESS waves contain six standardised questions that I use to capture attitudes towards immigration.These questions are (emphasis added): Possible answers to questions 1-3 are: "Allow none", "Allow a few", "Allow some" and "Allow many" and are coded with values 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

4) Would you say it is generally bad or good for [country]'s economy that people come
to live here from other countries?(Possible answers on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is "bad for the economy" and 10 is "good for the economy") 5) Would you say that [country]'s cultural life is generally undermined or enriched by people coming to live here from other countries?(Possible answers on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is "cultural life undermined" and 10 is "cultural life enriched") 6) Is [country] made a worse or a better place to live by people coming to live here from other countries?(Possible answers on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is "worse place to live" and 10 is "better place to live") As the answers to the six questions are highly correlated (Cronbach's α = 0.83), I create an index of pro-immigration attitudes using the first factor of the principal component analysis (the Eigenvalue of which is 3.802; the Eigenvalue of the second component is 0.921).the index is rescaled to have a mean on zero and a standard deviation of one, and its higher values always correspond to more positive attitudes towards immigration.

Key regressor: health
SOEP includes a number of questions allowing to capture the health status of the respondent: 1) Current self-rated health status, with answers ranging from "very bad" (1) to "very good" (5) 2) Satisfaction with health, with answers ranging from "completely dissatisfied" (0) to "very satisfied" (10) 3) Number of annual doctor visits 4) Overnight hospital stays 5) Disability status of individual (0/1) 6) Physical and mental health summary scales (NBS).
Questions 1-5 are available on annual basis, while physical and mental health summary scales are available biannually from 2002.
All waves of the ESS contain the following questions allowing to capture the health status: 1) Subjective health: "How is your health in general?Would you say it is… very good (5), good (4), fair (3), bad (2) or very bad (1)" 2) Health conditions: "Are you hampered in your daily activities in any way by any longstanding illness, or disability, infirmity or mental health problem?", with possible answers "Yes, a lot", "Yes, to some extern" and "No" In addition, in Round 7 (2014/15) of the ESS respondents were asked about specific health issues: "Which of the health problems that you had or experienced in the last 12 months hampered you in your daily activities in any way?: heart or circulation problem; high blood pressure; breathing problems such as asthma; allergies; back or neck pain; muscular or joint pain in hand or arm; muscular or joint pain in foot or leg; problems related to stomach or digestion, skin condition; severe headaches; diabetes; cancer."2) "Has someone in your household had Covid-19?", with possible answers "No", "Yes, they tested positive" and "Yes, they think they had Covid-19" 3) "Will you get vaccinated?", with possible answers "I already have", "I will" and "No, I will not".4) "Do you agree with the following statement: Coronavirus is the result of deliberate and concealed efforts of some government or organisation?"5) "Are you satisfied with how health services coped with the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences?"

Control variables
The individual-level control variables that will be included in the empirical analyses are age, education level, satisfaction with household income, and registered unemployed for SOEP (time-variant characteristics only, as all time-invariant characteristics will be captured by the individual-fixed effects); and age, gender, education, income (income band and subjective evaluation), employment status, type of geographical residence (rural-urban), political leaning (right-left), religiousness, foreign born, parent(s) immigrant for ESS.
In addition, the moderation analyses will rely on the information on subjective well-being and the perceptions of immigrants' use of public services.The subjective wellbeing measures include the standard life satisfaction (evaluative wellbeing, available both SOEP and ESS in all years/rounds) and happiness (hedonic wellbeing, available in ESS in all rounds).Perceptions of immigrants' use of public services, as well as the general state of health services, are based on the ESS questions: 1) "Social benefits/services encourage people from other countries to come and live here", from 1 (agree strongly) to 5 (disagree strongly), available in Round 4 only; 2) "Taxes and services: immigrants take out more than they put in or less", from 0 (take out more) to 10 (put in more), available in Rounds 1 and 7 only; and 3) "State of health services in country nowadays", from 0 (extremely bad) to 10 (extremely good), available in all rounds of the ESS.
The summary statistics of all variables included in the analysis are available in the Appendix.

Estimation strategy
Given the longitudinal/panel structure of SOEP, models drawing on it will be estimated with individual-fixed effects.The effect of ageone of the key determinants of attitudes towards immigrationwill be captured through age-fixed effects, implying, among other things, that year-fixed effects cannot be included because of perfect collinearity.5I, however, control for two time periods of potentially increased concern about immigration in Germanythe EU enlargement of 2004 and the European Refugee "Crisis" of 2015-16by adding two dummy variables for the time periods 2004-06 and 2015-17.Furthermore, given the mobility of residents within Germany and the conjecture that some regions may attract residents with specific attitudes towards immigration, I include federal state (Bundesländer) fixed effects.
Formally, for individual i living in state j in year t: Worries about immigrationijt = healthijt + Xijt + ageit + µi + statej + t2004-06 + t2015-17 + εitj (1) where X is a vector of time-variant individual-level control variables (education level, satisfaction with household income, and registered unemployed), ageit are age-fixed effects, µi are individual-fixed effects, and εitj is the error term.
The given the categorical and ordered nature of the dependent variable (worry about immigration), the ordered logit or probit would be appropriate ways to estimate the models drawing on SOEP.However, estimating non-linear models is problematic with fixed effects, which is why the OLS FE estimator will be used.The standard errors will be clustered at the respondent level at all times.
Given the repeated-cross-sectional nature of the ESS, the estimations drawing on it will use country and round fixed effects.Formally, for individual i living in country j in survey round t: where X is a vector of individual-level control variables (age, gender, education, income (income band and subjective evaluation), employment status, type of geographical residence (rural-urban), political leaning (right-left), religiousness, foreign born, parent(s) immigrant) and εitj is the error term.

RESULTS
Table 1 reports the results of the models testing the relationship between various measures of health and worries about immigration in Germany.The longitudinal nature of the data allows to establish how, for the same people, the two variables co-evolve over time (within-person estimates), and the inclusion of individual-fixed effects eliminates the risk of endogeneity potentially stemming from time-invariant individual-level characteristics.The results reveal that positive health changes are associated with the lowering of worries about immigration: subjective health evaluation, satisfaction with health, and the physical health summary scale measure are all negative and statistically significant (p < 0.01) and negative predictors of the worries (Specifications 1-3).The associations are non-negligeable in terms of terms of magnitudefor example, one step up on the subjective 1 to 5 subjective health scale or two steps up on the 0 to 10 health satisfaction scale imply a similar reduction in worries as one step up on the 0 to 10 satisfaction with household income scale.
While the changes in the disability status and the number of annual doctor visits are statistically non-significant (Specifications 4 and 5), an increase in the number of nights spent in hospital is associated with lower worries about immigration (Specification 6).This seemingly counter-intuitive result could be explained by the conjecture that longer time spent in hospital would ultimately lead to an improvement in one's health.Finally, similarly to physical health, an improvement in mental health, as captured by the NBS mental health summary scale, is also associated with a reduction of worries about immigration.Table 2 reports the results of the models testing the relationship between health-related variables and attitudes towards immigration, based on the repeated-cross-sectionalal ESS data.Better subjective health is a strong (p < 0.01) positive predictor of attitudes towards immigration, with one unit on the 1 to 5 subjective health scale being associated with an increase of approximately 0.07 of the standard deviation of the attitudes index (Specifications 1 and 2).The Shapley decomposition (Israeli, 2007;Shorrocks, 2013) based on Specification 1 suggests that variation in subjective health contributes close to 5% of the explained variance of the pro-immigration attitudes indexmore, for example, than the variation in age (Figure 1).Having a hindering, long-standing health condition is also strongly associated with less favourable attitudes towards immigration (Specification 3)a result that, among other things, provides further support for the hypothesis that health affects attitudes towards immigration (rather than the other way around). .
Overall, both within-person analyses in Germany (Table 1) and between-person analyses in European countries (Table 2) suggest that health is significant determinant of worries and attitudes towards immigration.2, based on the method of Shapley decomposition.
Table 3 summarises the results of the models that test the relationship between specific health conditions and attitudes towards immigration, based on data from the ESS Round 7 (2014-15).The coefficients for most health conditions are negative and several are statistically significant: people reporting back and neck problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, muscular/joint issues, and skin conditions are all more likely to have less favourable attitudes towards immigration (Specification 1-11).Given that several health conditions can be mutually dependent, I also estimate a model with all conditions included at the same time (Specification 12).High blood pressure, muscular/joint (foot/leg) issues and skin conditions now emerge as the only drivers of the anti-immigration sentiment.Table 4 proceeds with the analysis of the moderating effects of subjective well-being on the relationship between health and worries/attitudes towards immigration.Specification 1 and 4 provide the benchmark coefficients of the subjective health status in the models without wellbeing controls, for SOEP and ESS.Subjective well-being measureslife satisfaction and happinessare statistically significant predictors of the outcomes variables in their own right: greater life satisfaction and happiness are associated lower worries about and more positive attitudes towards immigration (Specifications 2 and 5-7).A joint inclusion of the subjective health status and subjective well-being reduces the importance of the former: in the SOEP sample, the health status coefficient drops by 25% and is now statistically significant only at the 10% level (specification 3), and in the ESS sample the health status coefficient is reduced by half (but remains statistically significant at the 1% level), Specification 8.All in all, our results suggest that the effect of (physical) health on attitudes towards immigration is partially explained by the changes in subjective well-being.Table 5 reports tests for the conjecture that the effect of health on attitudes towards immigration is driven by the competition for resources (public services), all based on the ESS data.First, the inclusion of perceptions of the state of public health services reduces the coefficient of subjective health by one fifth (Specifications 1 and 2).Second, believing that public benefits encourage migrants to come does not seem to affect the coefficient of the subjective health status (Specifications 3 and 4).Finally, believing that migrants contribute to taxes more than they take out reduces the coefficient of the health status by a third.There is, thus, some indication that the effect of health on attitudes towards immigration is partly (but not fully) driven by the perceptions of resource competition.Note also that the perceptions of the state of health services and beliefs about migrants' use of country's public services are significant predictors of the immigration attitudes in their own rights.

CONCLUSION
This paper set out to explore the relationship between health and attitudes towards immigrationan overlooked dimension in the burgeoning literature exploring the links between health, well-being and migration.Both longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses confirm that better individual health is associated with more positive attitudes towards immigration.This applies to various measures of health, including subjective health status, satisfaction with health, the presence of long-standing hindering health conditions, as well as specific health conditions, such as high blood pressure, muscular and join pains and skin conditions.The effect of health on attitudes towards immigration is partially explained by changes in subjective/emotional well-being (specifically, affect misattribution, whereby people project their negative emotions onto outgroups) and perceptions of immigrants use of public services (in line with the competition for resources conjecture, whereby people concerned about resource availability develop more negative attitudes towards outgroups).
Regarding the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, people believing in Covid-conspiracies (including the vaccine-hesitant) and those perceiving health services to be struggling with consequences of the pandemic are more negative towards immigrationa finding that can be explained by the behavioural immune system theory assuming that these Covid-related attitudes reflect fear and worry.Interestingly, people thinking that they or someone from their household had Covid-19 are particularly likely to be more positive towards immigration; this finding can be explained by the increase in positive emotions following a recovery from serious illness which, in turn, feed into more positive attitudes towards outgroups.
By identifying health as a key determinant of attitudes towards immigration, this study potentially holds an important policy implication that health improvements can lead to more positive attitudes towards immigration and, through them, affect immigration policy, migration flows. 6The usual caveat, however, applies, as the evidence presented in this study is correlational rather than causaleven if the use of longitudinal data has allowed to eliminate endogeneity due to unobserved, time-invariant individual-level characteristics.
Further research should seek to mitigate other potential causes of endogeneity and establish the causal effects of heath on attitudes towards immigration.

H1:
Poorer health leads to more negative attitudes towards immigration H2: Health affects attitudes towards immigration through changes in subjective wellbeing H3: Health affects attitudes towards immigration through perceptions of immigrants' use of public services H4: Being concerned about COVID-19 leads to more negative attitudes towards immigration 3. DATA, VARIABLES AND ESTIMATION STRATEGY 3.1.Data To test the proposed hypotheses, I use two datasets: the German Socio-Economic Panel and the European Social Survey.German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) is a longitudinal, representative survey of approximately 15,000 households in Germany from 1984 (from 1990 in the former Democratic Republic of Germany) to 2020 (the latest release).Besides standard sociodemographic indicators, the survey includes information on health and social attitudes, including worries about immigration, making it suitable for the purposes of this study.Given the availability of data for the key outcome variable (worries about immigration), this study will use the 1999-2020 span of the survey.European Social Survey (ESS) is a cross-national survey of social values, norms, behaviours and attitudes conducted biannually in a range of European countries since 2002.Altogether 38 European countries participated in the first ten rounds (2002/03, 2004/05, ... 2020/21) of the survey.The number of respondents in nationally representative samples varies from 579 to 3,045 in each country-round, and the survey is best described as repeated cross sections.

1)
To what extent do you think[country]  should allow people of the same race or ethnic group as most of[country]'s people to come and live here?2) To what extent do you think [country] should allow people of a different race or ethnic group from most of [country]'s people to come and live here?3)To what extent do you think[country]  should allow people from the poorer countries outside Europe to come and live here?

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The relative importance of subjective health

Table 2 .
Health and attitudes towards immigration in Europe, European Social Survey, 2002-2021 household income terciles, subjective evaluation of household income, political orientation, unemployed not looking for a job, unemployed looking for a job, religiousness, born abroad, having immigrant parents, level of urbanisation.

Table 4 .
Health and worries about immigration: controlling for subjective wellbeing Standard errors in parentheses.The same controls as in Table1included in Specifications 1-3 and the same controls as in Table2included in Specifications 4-8.

Table 5 .
Health, perceptions of migrants' use of social services and attitudes towards immigration, European Social Survey Individual controls: age, gender, education, household income terciles, subjective evaluation of household income, political orientation, unemployed not looking for a job, unemployed looking for a job, religiousness, born abroad, having immigrant parents, level of urbanisation.-19 is a result of deliberate and concealed efforts of some government or organisation and unsatisfaction with how health services coped with the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences (Specifications 3-5).Overall, beliefs in conspiracy theories and perceptions of overstrained health services could be indicative of a high degree of anxiety, fear and worry during a major pandemic.As predicted by the behavioural immune system theory, people would project such feelings into outgroups, including immigrants.: * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.Standard errors in parentheses.Individual controls: age, gender, education, household income terciles, subjective evaluation of household income, political orientation, unemployed not looking for a job, unemployed looking for a job, religiousness, born abroad, having immigrant parents, level of urbanisation.
(text based on limited sample resultssee the new table below) Finally, the results of some exploratory analyses into the relationship between Covid-19-related variables and attitudes towards immigration are reported in Table6.The sample consists European countries (mainly Eastern European countries) that have participated in the latest (2020/21) ESS round and for which the data have been released.More negative attitudes towardsCovid-19 vaccinationand indeed the refusal to get a vaccineare associated with more negative attitudes towards immigration, as are the beliefs that Covid(new results based on data downloaded on June 26, 2023nearly all countries) (limited sample) Table 6.Covid-19 and attitudes towards immigration, European Social Survey, 2020-21 Dependent variable: Index of pro-immigration attitudes, OLS Notes