Although the title promises to tell us about public attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, the focus is on negative attitudes, or what Fetzer calls “nativism,” an American term that can be equated with xenophobia in the European context (see chap. 1, note 1). Fetzer never goes beyond a broad definition of the term, but he is careful to isolate the complex renditions of this dependent variable along three dimensions: immigration affect, policy preferences, and support for anti-immigrant movements. The author's stab at compiling extensive comparative data is impressive, especially given serious constraints in obtaining cross-national data.

The exploration of causal attitudinal factors ventures into a major polemic in our understanding of tolerance of minorities and immigrants. What explains immigrant rejection and hostility—economics or culture? Attitudinal research has yielded contradictory results over ecological and contextual factors, and theoretical advances are inconclusive. Ironically, Fetzer rarely speaks directly to a whole host of budding scholarship in the immigration field, which has made significant headway on subjects he addresses. These include the rise and consolidation of the extreme Right parties, restrictive immigration policies, and immigration politics. To these studies, Fetzer's book uniquely adds rigorous empirical data testing that relies on theories exported from social psychology, economics, and cultural anthropology.

Fetzer works in “threes.” He tests three theories in three separate nation-states employing three different modes of analysis: historical, time-series, and cross-sectional analyses. The first question to be asked is how the United States, a traditional country of permanent immigration, fits into a comparative scheme with such temporary labor countries as France and Germany. More might have been said about the comparative framework, the rationale of case selection, and the convergent findings.

The prevalence of each theory—marginality, economic self-interest, and contact—is tested against models of the three forms of nativism/xenophobia. Marginality theory, whether cultural, economic, religious, or gender-based, poses that people who are considered outside the dominant cultural template of a society are ceteris paribus more likely than their native counterparts to empathize with oppressed individuals (i.e., incoming immigrants). It suggests that marginalized groups will not be socialized into the dominant norms of the society, as Fetzer argues is the case with American Jews, who maintain a culture distinct from the dominant Protestant culture of the United States (p. 9).

Economic self-interest theory includes both the typical labor market variant and the use-of-service type. It may involve relative deprivation or sociotropic effects. In terms of immigration, the theory posits that individuals who believe their economic well-being is endangered by an influx of cheap labor will be more likely to feel an anti-immigrant effect than will people who believe they are secure in their job and income position. There is a tendency here to treat immigrants as a monolithic group and to overlook the threat that the rapidly growing and important skilled labor force poses to highly educated natives (p. 21).

The contact thesis (both individual and aggregate) involves the amount and type of exposure to immigrants. Much of this theory stems from the work of Gordon Allport (The Nature of Prejudice, 1979), who identified two main types of contact: “casual contact,” which promotes prejudice, and “true acquaintance,” which generates more tolerance. Fetzer attempts to conduct analysis on measures that he argues represent both forms of contact. The analysis seems to fall short of effectively measuring what would allow us to distinguish between casual and true acquaintance contact. To some degree this problem can be ignored, because all the measures used to test for the presence of contact theory are not systematically proven, but it does beg some questions about theoretical utility.

Fetzer concludes that a number of assumptions of both economic and marginality theories are upheld by the data. When they contradict each other, the marginality theory has a slight advantage, especially when it is formulated in cultural terms. These conclusions are rather clear, but the explanatory power of each theory alone is somewhat compromised by the failure to account for interaction effects. Many of the theoretical streams overlap (i.e., economic marginality and economic self-interest) or appear to be at loggerheads (i.e., sociotropic versus self-interest), which underminies their predictive value. One might take issue with these competing paradigms in favor of a more interactive approach, such as that used by Jeannette Money in her analysis of anti-immigrant sentiment at the local level (Fences and Neighbors, 1999). Her study reveals that the interactive part of job competition, for example, comes not from the mere presence of migrants but their presence when unemployment rises (which is what creates labor market competition). This perspective underscores the need to identify and delineate more systematically these contextual variables so as to predict conditions under which rejection explodes.

Fetzer is much more successful at isolating the causes of xenophobia than he is in his perscriptive trajectory. Although he builds a compelling case for policy-relevant attitudinal research, his policy prescriptions do not flow from the data. Fetzer never clearly states how public opinion relates to policy articulation and elaboration. He corroborates conventional postnational arguments made by such scholars as Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (Limits of Citizenship, 1994) and David Jacobson (Rights across Borders, 1996) about the narrowing of boundaries, but there is some tautology in his assessment that the lines between immigrants and dominant cultures fade. In fact, this claim seems to contradict his important finding that minorities continue to ally with their “cultural” kin.

The use of multilevel modes of qualitative and quantitative analysis is commendable. The longitudinal rationale and breakdown of timeframes are not necessarily obvious, however, and the historical analysis is often anecdotal. Fetzer runs into some typical problems with cross-national measures of foreign-born populations (see tables A1.1, 4), which vary with regard to geographic or citizenship criteria. The comparative operationalization of the dependent variable is also somewhat uneven. Intuitively, Fetzer captures an important distinction in the literature between immigration and immigrant policy preferences, but his measurement of these concepts often confounds the two. Does support for Le Pen or the Front National strictly capture anti-immigrant sentiment in France (p. 85), and is it really analogous to American attitudes toward immigration levels? Furthermore, is the right to asylum tantamount to immigrant rights, as Fetzer conceives (p. 111), or does it represent the admission-type of policy areas?

Fetzer's bold foray into the critical “micro-macro question” (p. 148) is a thrilling opening to those stuck in that scholarly divide. The discussion of the two components of Allport's contact theory is a thought-provoking and welcomed alternative to the linear thinking on immigrant effects. Ultimately the book fails to answer directly the important question of individual-aggregate discrepancies, because it is not certain that it truly tests for the latter form of contact and because it defers to the promise of “further research” (p. 81). To be fair, Fetzer does not make this question the pivot of his study. In fact, his goals are much more humble and modest.

If research contributions are evaluated by the extent of questions and further research they inspire, then Fetzer's book is a promise of success. Are the conclusions generalizable? Cultural marginality does not seem to explain why, in immigrant-importing countries of the Middle East, temporary labor is recruited specifically from Asia and other non-Semitic countries. What is the role of international relations as an intervening variable (p. 59)? What is the role of political elites and the media, and how do they relate to mass attitudes? More generally, how do these attitudes relate to policy outcomes? My own comparative work on elite and public opinion has revealed far greater convergence than Fetzer (p. 149) and others project. As Fetzer readily concludes in explaining the German outlier (pp. 132, 149), leaders shape the immigration debate and therefore public reaction. If so, do public attitudes matter? My findings imply that they do, and, thus, Fetzer's work is illuminating.

By embracing the normative component, Fetzer helps fill a critical void in comparative immigration scholarship, and he makes a unique advance in the scientific inquiry into such an emotionally charged issue. Despite the disappointing array of evasive inferences, the book serves as an important prelude and invites more in-depth studies of attitudes. It will be widely cited.