This study explores the relationships between intergenerational social class mobility and attitudes towards immigration. We interpret a failure to keep up with parental social class (i.e., downward mobility) as an indicator that individual’s status achievements lag behind expectations and contribute to subjective feelings of loss and decline. An innovative feature of this study is that we investigate both whether individual’s mobility experience – micro level – and also whether opportunity structures – mobility on a macro level – are linked with attitudes towards immigration. In contexts with high downward-mobility, opportunities for moving up are limited and hence perceived economic decline and loss might lead to more hostility towards immigrants. We use the European Social Survey data (2002–2010) and conduct analyses on 30 countries using diagonal reference models that allow the effects of individual mobility trajectory to be disentangled from origin status and destination status. Our results show that the working classes hold stronger anti-immigration attitudes and parental class continues to exert an effect on attitudes in adulthood even after accounting for individual’s own social class position. Being downwardly mobile from parental class does not appear to be associated with more hostility towards immigrants, except in a few European countries like Italy, Poland, and Greece. Our random-effects meta-regression models show, however, that people living in contexts of high downward mobility are more hostile towards immigrants compared to people in contexts with high upward mobility.

这项研究探讨了代际社会阶层流动性与移民态度之间的关系。我们将未能跟上父母的社会阶层（即向下的流动性）解释为一个指标，表明个人的地位成就落后于预期，并导致主观的失落感和下降感。这项研究的创新之处在于，我们不仅调查个人的流动经验（微观层面），而且还探讨机会结构（宏观层面的流动）是否与移民态度相关联。在高度向下流动的情况下，上升的机会有限，因此，人们认为经济下滑和损失可能导致对移民的更多敌视。我们使用欧洲社会调查（2002-2010）数据，并使用对角线参考模型对30个国家/地区进行分析，该模型可将个人流动轨迹的影响与出发地和目的地状态区分开。我们的结果表明，工人阶级拥有更强的反移民态度，父母阶级即使考虑了个人的社会阶级地位，也继续对成年后的态度产生影响。除了像意大利，波兰和希腊这样的少数欧洲国家，与父母阶层向下流动的人似乎与对移民的更大敌意无关。然而，我们的随机效应元回归模型显示，与高上迁往情境下的人相比，在高下往迁情境下生活的人对移民更具敌意。