The thesis has examined people’s attitudes towards immigration, aiming to relate them to the civic or ethnic national identity of their state; with particular focus on the cases of the UK and Germany, respectively. The starting point of the analysis was the probability of correlation between the two variables, namely the perceived threats towards immigrants were expected to correlate to the civic and ethnic national identity. Civic national identity was supposed to be linked with positive immigration threat perception and negative immigration threat perception was anticipated in the case of ethnic national identity. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the correlation is not linear. The expectations that the British perceive immigrants as a lesser threat than the Germans are rejected, given the detailed data analysis which shows that the Germans have a more positive attitude towards immigrants. Moreover, the results point towards the idea that legal immigration has increased after some changes in the immigration policies of Germany and the UK. In this paper, a detailed analysis that includes realistic, symbolic and social threat was made. In all of them, German respondents are more tolerant towards immigrants compared to British. This leads us to the conclusion that the concept of civic and ethnic national identity should be reconsidered. Having in mind these new empirical findings, the latter should be reformulated.
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