Attitudes Towards Immigrants and Relative Deprivation: The Case of a Middle-Income Country

This paper applies the concept of group relative deprivation to studying formation of attitudes towards immigrants in a middle-income country’s setting. It finds that the feeling of relative deprivation adversely affects the attitudes, even when the potential endogeneity of relative deprivation is taken into account. Furthermore, relative deprivation matters only for natives who subjectively underestimate their well-being, but not for those who overestimate it. When considering other forms of natives’ perceived disadvantage, such as in terms of employment, access to education or medical facilities, there is a weak evidence that only perceived disadvantage in obtaining medical aid negatively affects the attitudes