The ‘intergroup paradox’ in Andalusia (Spain): an explanatory model

The widely renowned theory of group-threat predicts anti-immigrant backlash when immigration societies experience economic downturns. However, despite skyrocketing unemployment and widespread misgivings about immigration’s impact, no discernible wave of anti-immigrant sentiment has emerged in Spain; the ensuing puzzle accentuates in the southernmost region of Andalusia, where jobless rates surged beyond 35%. This study examines why anti-immigrant animosity remained stable at low levels, even receded, amidst such inauspicious conditions. Our explanatory model expects increasingly adverse pressures of perceived group-threat on natives’ sentiment toward immigrants to be compensated by increasingly benign impact of various benevolent predispositions and situational perceptions. To test these assumptions, we compute a repeated logistic regression model, discern coefficient from sample effects and examine time-trends among vulnerable populations; data were collected at the crisis’ onset (2008) and nadir (2013). Defying expectations, neither perceived group-threat nor principled pro-immigration credos (Universalism; pro-diversity) were found to affect the evolution of anti-immigrant sentiment appreciably throughout the economic downturn; however, ideological polarisation and elite-bashing yielded increasingly benign impact. These findings suggest that intergroup tensions were kept latent by a dynamics of political competition that has side-lined immigration as salient social issue: the prevalence of anti-austerity, anti-corruption political rhetoric contributed to pre-empting anti-immigrant sentiment.