ABSTRACT
The mass-influx of refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers poses a fundamental challenge to the EU’s project of European integration and enlargement. With this chapter we ask how immigration from non-EU countries is perceived by national assemblies’ representatives within the EU. We assume, that MPs’ perception of immigration as a threat (or not) is not only determined by their political left-right orientation but also by their “Europeanness”, i.e. their attachment to Europe (emotive dimension), their approval or rejection of the present state of European integration and their willingness to delegate specific policy competencies to the EU level (cognitive and conative dimension). If the latter proves true this would be a clear indication of the emergence of a new integration-demarcation conflict line which complements or even crosscuts the traditional left-right divide. To seek empirical support we use data from MPs of eleven EU national assemblies collected by the ENEC (European National Elites and the Crisis) research network in 2014. By applying multi-level analysis we also control for national parliaments’ composition, socio-demographic characteristics and through the location of parliaments within specific EU country groups.
