Abstract The belief that hard work can lead to advancement in a society stands as a key motivation for migrating. The literature on migration, however, has viewed meritocratic attitudes in a different light, arguing that a belief in a meritocratic society can cause migrants to be more accepting of inequalities and blind them to structural explanations of it. To add to this debate, I therefore study whether migrants generally perceive their recipient countries to be meritocracies or not, as well as what can explain these attitudes. I answer these questions using a survey collected among nine migrant groups in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. The results show that all the migrant groups perceive the three recipient countries as meritocratic, though there are differences among the groups. The article further studies what these variations in the belief in the meritocratic society can be explained by.

中文翻译：

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移民和精英阶层：

摘要勤奋工作可以促进社会进步的信念是迁移的主要动力。然而，关于移民的文献从不同的角度看待了精英制的态度，认为对精英制社会的信仰会导致移民更多地接受不平等，并使他们无法对不平等现象进行结构性的解释。因此，除了这场辩论之外，我还将研究移民是否普遍认为自己的接收国是优才，以及如何解释这些态度。我使用在丹麦，荷兰和德国的9个移民群体中收集的调查回答了这些问题。结果表明，尽管各移民群体之间存在差异，但所有移民群体都将​​这三个接受国视为精英。