Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Impact Of A Pandemic On Attitudes Towards Immigrants, Jinghui Zhang

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Immigration control is an issue that figures prominently in public policy discussions and election campaigns throughout the world. Immigrants can be perceived as posing both realistic and symbolic threats to the host society. During the current global pandemic, these threats are amplified. This research investigated how attitudes towards immigrants were likely to be more negative when the impact of the pandemic was made salient. Based on intergroup threat theory (Rios et al., 2018) and uncertainty identity theory (Hogg, 2021a), two empirical studies investigated the effect of realistic and symbolic threats from the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s attitudes towards immigrants. Study …