The social values of newly arrived immigrants in Sweden

Abstract

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.