The name is absent

“People come to live in [the country where the respondent was questioned]
from other countries for different reasons. Some have ancestral ties. Others
come to work here, or to join their families. Others come because they’re
under threat. Here are some questions about this issue.”⁵

We concentrate on the then member countries of the European Union.
By restricting the set of observations to these countries, and by focusing on
individual preferences with respect to the immigration from poorer countries
of Europe,⁶ we implicitly examine the determinants of individual attitudes
in the pre-enlargement European Union toward immigration from countries
that were about to join the Union on May 1, 2004.

3.1 Dependent variable

Our dependent variable indicates whether each respondent had a preference
for immigration restriction. We are interested in individual attitudes in the
pre-2004 enlargement European Union toward immigration from the coun-
tries that were about to join the Union. The variable is hence based on the
responses to the following question:⁷

• To what extent do you think [the country where the respondent was
questioned] should allow people from poorer countries in Europe to
come and live here?

⁵By the use of “live”, the permanency of immigrants’ stay is deliberately made ambigu-
ous. See Chapter 3 (Part 1) of the ESS Round 1 2002/2003 Technical Report (Edition 2,
June 2004) for the aim and outline of the immigration-related questions. We used Edition
6.0 of the data set that was released at http://ess.nsd.uib.no on 19 December 2006.

⁶ See the following subsection about the dependent variable, anti.

⁷The ten countries that joined the Union in 2004 had both GDP and GNP per capita
lower than any EU15 country according to World Bank’s World Development Indicators.
The exception is Malta.

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