The social values of newly arrived immigrants in Sweden

Concerns have been raised that immigrants coming to Europe bring fundamentally different social values, affecting the more liberal receiving societies negatively. However, the topic of immigrants' social values is understudied, and much research studies only one issue at a time, lacking a syste...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-11, Vol.17 (11), p.e0278125-e0278125
Main Authors: Tibajev, Andrey, Vartanova, Irina, Puthoopparambil, Soorej, Essén, Birgitta, Strimling, Pontus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abortion
Beliefs, opinions and attitudes
Biology and Life Sciences
Citizenship
Culture
Demographic aspects
Emigrants and Immigrants
Emigration and Immigration
Europe
Gender equity
Heterogeneity
Humans
Immigrants
Immigration
Medicine and Health Sciences
Muslims
People and places
Research and Analysis Methods
Social aspects
Social Sciences
Social Values
Society
Sweden
Values
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Summary:Concerns have been raised that immigrants coming to Europe bring fundamentally different social values, affecting the more liberal receiving societies negatively. However, the topic of immigrants' social values is understudied, and much research studies only one issue at a time, lacking a systematic approach to compare immigrants and native-born across issues. We study the social values of immigrants in Sweden using a large sample of newly arrived immigrants and their opinions on 35 different moral issues. Our results indicate a large heterogeneity across different issues, with, on average, a general tendency towards liberal social values among immigrants. We find that individual characteristics are more important than characteristics of the country of origin in explaining variation of social values between immigrants. Religiosity has the largest effect, with more religious individuals having more conservative stances. Using external data sources, we compare immigrants with native-born regarding both average positions on different issues, and the correlation between issue positions. Compared with the native-born, immigrants have, on average, somewhat more conservative values, but the underlying values structure is the same.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0278125