A DEA MCDM Approach Applied to ESS8 Dataset for Measuring Immigration and Refugees Citizens’ Openness

Abstract

The current refugees’ crisis is undermining the main government coalitions of many countries in the European Union (EU), and tolerant attitudes and open admission policies toward immigrants seem to be part of the recent past history. The dilemma is gaining a lot of media attention as the public and political debate on migration is now playing an important role in all the European elections. Thus, the aim of this paper twofold. First, an analytical tool is developed to measure two synthetic indicators: (1) the citizens’ openness towards immigration for 23 countries—18 EU Countries, plus Iceland, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, and Russia—included in the 2016 European Social Survey; and (2) the citizens’ openness towards immigrants and refugees for 22 countries (same set without Hungary). And second, the effects of political orientation of citizens over the last synthetic indicator (immigrants and refugees) are studied. The approach of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) will be adopted here, with the purpose of identifying which countries are more, or less, open to the phenomenon of immigration and refugees. The results show that the Nordic countries and leftist are those which show more openness to immigration and refugees.

A fuzzy-hybrid analysis of citizens’ perception toward immigrants in Europe

“…Although, Austria and Italy seem to be more similar to the Eastern countries than to Western European countries. Results are concordant with other previous studies (Bail 2008;Chylíková 2016;Davidov et al 2018;Heath and Richards 2020;Martín and Indelicato 2021).…”

“…To our surprise, the implementation of other quantitative approaches, such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Fuzzy Hybrid Approach (FHA), has been scarcely used in the field. Nevertheless, these methods present several advantages over other traditional econometric models (Martín and Indelicato 2021). Furthermore, Kentmen-Cin and recommended, assessing critically previous research on attitudes towards immigrants and their relationship with EU attitudes, the use of other quantitative methods and designs to deepen the understanding of the relationship.…”

Analyzing the Main Determinants for Being an Immigrant in Cuenca (Ecuador) Based on a Fuzzy Clustering Approach

“…This negative perception of economic costs is particularly linked to developed welfare systems that provide houses, clothes, education and health care to immigrants. For this reason, a number of recent studies have found that attitudes towards immigrants in Western European countries are becoming more negative than in the past [1,[3][4][5][6][7].…”

“…There are a number of reasons that can influence the migrants in deciding whether to settle in another country; these depend on different traits, such as income, cultural background and lifestyle [10,11]. Martín and Bustamante-Sánchez [8] categorized the main reasons to be retired immigrants as: (1) improving the quality of life; (2) retiring and living in countries that they knew on their vacation; (3) looking for a lower cost of life and warmer climates; (4) moving out to escape from their home countries or to be away from relatives; (5) knowing different people, cultures and places; (6) relaxing in quieter cities and towns where they can live away from noise and globalization; and (7) adjusting the preferences according to the place attachment.…”

“…As seen, the literature is abundant in the analysis of the attitudes towards immigrants from the perspective of the residents [1,7]. Nevertheless, the number of migrant studies analyzing the phenomenon from the perspective of immigrants is still scarce.…”