Political economy of immigration in Germany: Attitudes and citizenship aspiration

This paper examines resident foreigners ’ interest in German citizen-ship. We use a unique data set from a survey of foreign residents in the German states to study the roles played by factors such as atti-tudes towards foreigners and political interest of foreigners. We find that negative attitudes towards foreigners and generational conflict within foreigner families are significant negative factors. While interest in political participation is among the important positive factors, hostile attitudes, lack of voting rights, or uncertainty about staying in Germany mainly discourage foreigners who actively participate in the labor market, have more years of schooling, and are younger