Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Immigration Phobia and Its Paradoxes
- 2 The Immigration Security Dilemma: Anarchy, Offensiveness, and “Groupness”
- 3 The Two Faces of Socioeconomic Impact Perceptions
- 4 In the Shadow of the “Asian Balkans”: Anti-Chinese Alarmism and Hostility in the Russian Far East
- 5 Who's Behind “Fortress Europe”? Xenophobia and Antimigrant Exclusionism from Dublin to the Danube
- 6 Los Angeles Ablaze: Antimigrant Backlashes in the Nation of Immigrants
- 7 Immigration and Security: How Worst-Case Scenarios Become Self-Fulfilling and What We Can Do About It
- Appendix A Primorskii 2000 Survey: Regression Results
- Appendix B Eurobarometer Survey No. 47.1 (1997): Regression Results
- Appendix C A Journey into Fear: The Immigration Phobia Self-Test
- References
- Index
6 - Los Angeles Ablaze: Antimigrant Backlashes in the Nation of Immigrants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Immigration Phobia and Its Paradoxes
- 2 The Immigration Security Dilemma: Anarchy, Offensiveness, and “Groupness”
- 3 The Two Faces of Socioeconomic Impact Perceptions
- 4 In the Shadow of the “Asian Balkans”: Anti-Chinese Alarmism and Hostility in the Russian Far East
- 5 Who's Behind “Fortress Europe”? Xenophobia and Antimigrant Exclusionism from Dublin to the Danube
- 6 Los Angeles Ablaze: Antimigrant Backlashes in the Nation of Immigrants
- 7 Immigration and Security: How Worst-Case Scenarios Become Self-Fulfilling and What We Can Do About It
- Appendix A Primorskii 2000 Survey: Regression Results
- Appendix B Eurobarometer Survey No. 47.1 (1997): Regression Results
- Appendix C A Journey into Fear: The Immigration Phobia Self-Test
- References
- Index
Summary
Public opinion data from the Russian Far East and the EU show that the logic of the security dilemma is part and parcel of antimigrant hostility. Whereas antimigrant hostility does not automatically lead to mass violence (as has been the case so far in the Russian Far East and the EU), meta-analysis of social and psychological research strongly suggests that attitudes and behavior are significantly interrelated (Kraus 1995). As we shall see in this chapter, immigration resulting in ethnic balance shifts has been systematically associated with antimigrant hostility and interethnic violence in the world's most prominent “nation of immigrants,” the United States. Focusing on hostile response to the “new immigration” from about 1970 to the present and, in particular, on patterns of fatalities in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, this chapter examines the “added value” of the security-dilemma logic with respect to existing explanations of antiimmigrant violence in the United States. Another distinctive feature of this case study is the high levels of ethnic heterogeneity that characterized both the migrant population and migrant-receiving communities of the Greater Los Angeles area. In particular, the case of Black–Korean violence is a case of minority-against-minority violence. While posing a new question as to whether the security-dilemma logic would apply in minority-on-minority relations among ethnically heterogeneous populations, this case has underlying similarities with the Russian and European cases.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Immigration Phobia and the Security DilemmaRussia, Europe, and the United States, pp. 178 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005