  This study models cross-national attitudes towards immigrants in East and
Southeast Asia as a signed and weighted bipartite network of countries and
evaluative reactions to a variety of political issues, or determinants. This
network is then projected into two one-mode networks, one of countries and one
of determinants, and community detection methods are applied. The paper aims to
fill two deficiencies in the current research on attitudes towards immigrants:
1) the lack of cross-national studies in Asia, a region where migration is
growing, and 2) the tendency of researchers to treat determinants as
uncorrelated, despite the interdependent nature of evaluative reactions. The
results show that the nine countries in the sample are a cohesive clique,
showing greater similarities than differences in the determinants of their
attitudes. A blockmodeling approach was employed to identify eight determinants
in attitudes towards immigrants, namely views on independence and social
dependencies, group identities, absolute or relative moral orientation,
attitudes towards democracy, science and technology, prejudice and stigma, and
two determinants related to religion. However, the findings of this survey
yielded some surprising results when compared with the literature review.
First, education was not found to be a significant determinants of attitudes
towards immigrants, despite its strong and consistent predictive power in
European models. Second, prejudice appears to be mediated in part by religion,
especially in religious identification and belief in God. Group identity and
prejudice also appear to be related, though only weakly. Finally, anxiety
appears in clusters related to social norms, suggesting that fears regarding
immigrants relates closely to expectations of others' behavior.
