engleski

Anti-immigrant parties and liberal democracy

Although anti-immigrant parties are not a new social phenomenon (they existed also between the two world wars), recently they have increasingly occupied public and political space. A fundamental characteristic that defines a party as anti-immigrant is its opposition to immigration. In addition to opposing illegal immigration, anti-immigrant parties also demand more rigorous criteria for legal immigration or a complete ban on immigration. The reasons for opposing immigration may be different, and here we will list four reasons that most commonly occur in anti-immigrant discourse (Rydgren 2008, 739): 1) threat to ethnonational identity, 2) increased criminality rates among members of immigrant groups (rape, fear of terrorism), 3) unemployment (either in the sense of increasing the unemployment rate 32ri n the sense of reducing the cost of labour) and 4) immigrants as abusers of the generosity of (European) welfare states. In this paper, we will compare the principles advocated by anti-immigrant parties and the principles on which liberal democracy has been built to see if there is a level of confrontation between them.

anti-immigrant parties, migration, liberal democracy, liberal democratic principles, legal immigration, illegal immigration

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