National identity and attitudes to immigration

Since our last detailed look at this topic, immigration has become an issue of huge public concern. As Rob Ford and Anthony Heath discuss in the Immigration chapter, widespread public anxieties about migration levels and the impact of new arrivals in Britain mean that a large majority would like to see immigration levels reduced. Might immigration explain some of the changes we have found in what people think matters when it comes to being British, and particularly the rise in the importance attached to being able to speak English?

In this section we examine how people’s views about immigration relate to the way they think and feel about national identity. We do this by focusing on a set of questions about immigration, which we introduce to respondents as follows:

There are different opinions about immigrants from other countries living in Britain. (By ‘immigrants’ we mean people who come to settle in Britain). How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?

Table 4.6 shows the precise question wording of each statement. The findings are mixed and show that opinions on immigration have shifted in both a positive and negative direction over the last ten years. However, the largest change is in a negative direction and relates to people’s attitude towards whether legal immigrants should have the same rights as British citizens. In 2013 only 27 per cent of people agree with this statement, down from 40 per cent in 2003. 

To help our analysis we created a summary measure of attitudes towards immigration for each respondent, based on their responses to the questions in Table 4.6.[3] The results are shown in Table 4.7 and confirm there is a clear relationship between a person’s stance on immigration and what they think matters when it comes to determining whether someone is “truly British”. In general, those who think national identity has at least some ethnic element are more likely to be opposed to immigration; a third (34 per cent) fall into the most anti-immigration category, compared
with just 7 per cent of those whose view of national identity
emphasizes civic factors alone. 

To tease out the relationship between views about immigration and national identity we carried out multivariate logistic regression to identify the factors that are significantly associated with whether someone has an ethic and civic view of national identity (as opposed to one that has no ethnic element at all). We included a large set of other variables in our model, including age, sex, education, occupation, religion, country and parental citizenship, as well as respondents’ underlying libertarian-authoritarian, left-right economic values and whether they think that ‘feeling British’ is an important factor in being British. Further details of this technique can be found in the Technical details section of the report, and the full results of our analysis are shown in the Appendix to this chapter. The findings confirm that a person’s views about immigration are significantly related to whether they see British national identity as having an ethnic as well as a civic component. A number of other factors also matter. As we would expect from our earlier generational analysis, older people, the less educated and those who identify with the Church of England are more likely to have an ethnic and civic view of national identity. So too are workers in clerical, routine non-manual jobs or in working class occupations when compared to those in professional and managerial jobs (the ‘salariat’). Those who think that “feeling British” is an important aspect of “being truly British” are also more likely to see national identity in ethnic and civic terms. Finally, there is also an association between having an authoritarian mindset (as opposed to a libertarian one) and thinking of national identity in ethnic terms. Unsurprisingly, people whose parents were not UK citizens are less likely to think of national identity in ethnic terms.

In the previous section we showed that the most common view is that “being truly British” has both an ethnic and a civic component. We have now seen that people’s attitudes towards immigration are associated with the way they think about national identity, even when factors such as age and class are taken into account. Table 4.8 develops this further by looking at how views about Britishness have changed among groups with different views about immigration. Because of the small sample sizes at the pro-immigration end of our scale, here we focus on three groups only: the quarter (24 per cent in 2013) who are most opposed to immigration; the half (48 per cent in 2013) who are less opposed but sceptical about immigration; and the remaining quarter (28 per cent) who adopt a more pro-immigration view. The table shows that the increase in the proportion of people who see national identity as comprising both ethnic and civic elements is confined to those who are opposed to immigration – up from 84 per cent to 89 per cent among those with the most anti-immigration views and from 66 per cent to 71 per cent among the half of the population who are moderately opposed to immigration. There has been no statistically significant change among those who are more pro-immigration, a group who are far less likely to think that ethnic characteristics matter when it comes to whether or not someone is “truly British”.

What can we take from these findings? They certainly show that views about immigration are closely associated with how people think about what it means to be British. But they also suggest that changing views about what it is to be British (and specifically the small increase we have found in the proportion who think that both ethnic and civic factors matter) cannot necessarily be explained by changing attitudes towards immigration, as since 2003 attitudes to immigration have remained fairly stable. However, the fact the increase in the proportion of those who think that ethnic and civic factors matter has happened entirely among those with a negative view about immigration is noteworthy.