Migration is a global phenomenon which has been extensively researched on a general level,
emphasize being put mostly on western countries, with strong economies. However, migration towards less economically developed states is fairly undocumented. Former communist countries from Europe, which have experienced a population exodus in the last decades, only recently became places of interest for migrants.
Being a relatively new phenomenon, there are mostly crude data, generally concerning
immigration from a numerical perspective and not from the population’s point of view. Thus, the main issues with this subject are the lack of both data and literature. This research, which
analyses the immigration phenomenon from Romanians’ and Bulgarians’ perspective, provides valuable insights to the aforementioned domain, by presenting not only citizens’ attitudes towards immigration, but also predictors of negative and positive attitudes towards this phenomenon. This paper provides an in-depth analysis which identifies what factors form the attitudes towards migrants.
The research method which used in this paper is secondary data analyses. For this paper, I have used the most recent Eurobarometer, 98.2, whose data was collected between January and February 2023. I started with frequencies and crosstabs, to present the general attitudes towards migration. Afterwords, I used regression and factorial analyses in order to identify the attitude predictors towards immigration.
Romanians and Bulgarians have mixed feelings towards migration. Age, gender, political
orientation are strong predictors of positive attitudes towards migrants. The findings are
interesting, because, at a certain level, reject the idea that they discriminate against migrants. Findings from this paper not only fill a literature gap, but also help generate public policies, meant to ease migrant integration.
Keywords: Immigration, attitude, predictors, integration, Eastern Europe