ABSTRACT
The German General Social Survey includes a question battery on attitudes toward immigrants that has revealed a peculiar trend since 1980. Specifically, while xenophobic tendencies are decreasing in general, since the mid-1990s respondents have increasingly wanted immigrants to adapt more to the German way of life. This chapter presents the results from web surveys conducted in western and eastern Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Spain, the United States and Canada in October 2011. It looks at the argumentation patterns of extreme combinations of a general xenophobia measure and the adaptation item, respondents who reject a restriction of political activities of immigrants and their choice of marriage partners inside their own ethnic group and, demand more adaptation. Combining xenophobic responses to the politics and marriage items with disagreement with the adaptation item is a violation of the assumption that the three items can be considered to form a unidimensional scale.
