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International Area Studies Review
[ Article ]
International Area Studies Review - Vol. 27, No. 4, pp.401-415
ISSN: 2233-8659 (Print)
Print publication date 31 Dec 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.69473/iasr.2024.27.4.401

Trust, Sense of Security, and Immigration Policy Preferences of the Kenyan Public

Alan Dixon Brown ; Woo-Jin Shin* ; Jeong Hwan Bae ; Jangseop Byeon
Center for Regional Development, Chonnam National University, Gwangj, Republic of Korea
Department of Economics, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Republic of Korea
Department of Economics, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Republic of Korea
Center for Regional Development, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Republic of Korea

Correspondence to: *Email: sayurban@jnu.ac.kr

Abstract

Immigration is a hot-button issue in African countries, including Kenya. Our study is an empirical attempt to understand the effect of different types of trust and sense of security on attitudes toward immigrants in an African context, which has rarely been the subject of research. Our research model included ‘interpersonal trust’, ‘political-administrative system trust’, ‘international and non-government institutions trust’, and ‘supra-national institutions trust’. We also explored whether the group threat hypothesis, which states that as the number of immigrants increases, locals feel a general threat to their security of an economic or social nature, holds in an African context. We applied ordinal logistic regression to a sample of Kenyan data from World Values Survey Wave 7 (2021). We found that among the types of trust, the most consistent predictors of preferences for less restrictive immigration policy were general trust and supra-national institutions trust. Among the sense of security predictors of immigration policy preferences, higher levels of neighbourhood security predicted preferences for less restrictive immigration policy, while higher levels of terrorism worries predicted a preference for more restrictive immigration policy preferences; however, these results were only valid without including control variables. In the discussion, we elucidate implications of the results in both general terms and for the global south, in particular Africa.

Keywords:

Trust, Sense of security, Attitudes toward immigrants, Immigration policy preferences, Kenya

AI Acknowledgment

Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies were not used in any way to prepare, write, or complete essential authoring tasks in this manuscript.

Conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2023S1A5C2A07096111).

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