EMM4 and OPAM published new study with focus on Southern Partner Countries

This chapter overviews public attitudes to migration in Southern Partner Countries (SPCs) and considers their effects on migration politics and policies in the region over the past 20 to 30 years. The objective of this chapter is to answer the following question: What are the political effects of public attitudes to migration in the southern and eastern Mediterranean? To answer this question, a series of sub-questions are posed:  What are attitudes to immigration in the region?

How have migration patterns developed in the SPCs in the past decade? What kind of policies have countries adopted? And what explains these policies? To what extent can they be explained by attitudes to immigration? The methodology of this chapter is to analyse pan-regional quantitative data and consider qualitative data from four main country cases to represent the two main regions of the Mediterranean: Morocco and Tunisia in the south of the Mediterranean and Jordan and Lebanon in the East-Mediterranean region – in addition to the particular case of Palestine. In this report, we also offer a number of recommendations for how communicators on migration in the region can avoid polarisation. 

The first chapter of the report, considered how and why the dramatic changes in the salience of immigration in recent years have changed European politics. This report forms part of the Phase III EUROMED Migration Communications Study and follows Phase II EUROMED Migration Communications Study, entitled "Public attitudes on migration: rethinking how people perceive migration", which demonstrated that attitudes to migration in the Euro-Mediterranean region seem to have remained constant over time, while the importance of the issue to individuals has changed.