Presenters: Dr Ke Yu and Mr Steven Gordon, Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery, Human Sciences Research Council
Date: 29 October 2013
Time: 13:15 for 13:30 – 14:30
Among the BRICS countries (a growing force in international affairs), India, Russia, and South Africa are traditional immigrant destinations in the Global South. Other countries, by virtue of their economic performance, have also been identified by migration scholars as potential hot spots for future immigration.
Public attitude data, however, reveal an overall restrictive migration sentiment. To understand the implications of this disjunction between expected increase in immigration and anti-immigrants attitude, we examined the literature on attitudes towards immigration and zoomed in on one crucial factor consistently found to be correlated with pro-immigration attitudes. Education attainment, a proxy for exposure to educational systems, exposes individuals to multicultural ideas and a better appreciation of diversity.
However, the same system could also potentially cultivate anti-immigration attitudes as part of deliberate nation-building projects, where national pride and nationalism are created and maintained.
Using World Values Survey (WVS) data for the period of 1994-2007, we framed our inquiry around two central questions: do educational systems work as mediators of pro-immigrant or anti-immigration attitudes in BRICS? And to what extent do educational attainment effects differ within BRICS?
Kindly RSVP by 27 October 2013
This seminar may be attended via video conference in Pretoria, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal. Details as below.
Cape Town : HSRC, 12th Floor, Plein Park Building (Opposite Revenue Office), Plein Street, Cape Town. Contact Jean Witten, Tel (021) 4668004, Fax (021) 461 0299, or JWitten@hsrc.ac.za
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Pretoria : HSRC Video Conference, 1st floor HSRC Library Human Sciences Research Council, 134 Pretorius Street, Pretoria. Arlene Grossberg, Tel: (012) 302 2811, e-mail: acgrossberg@hsrc.ac.za