European women and migrants: are children the solution?

Maybe not

As an experiment, I am paywalling all my posts in December. I’ve been blogging for free since 2008 or so, so maybe it is time to cash-in a little bit. I’ve got a baby to feed. Today’s post is on that topic too.

I saw this funny and one might say provocative study:

• Schahbasi, A., Huber, S., & Fieder, M. (2021). Factors affecting attitudes toward migrants—An evolutionary approach. American Journal of Human Biology, 33(1), e23435.

Objective
To understand migration from an evolutionary perspective, this phenomenon has so far been mainly investigated in animal species. We therefore aim to investigate the potential evolutionary roots of attitudes toward migrants in humans.

Methods
We used data from the European Social Survey (n = 83 734), analyzing attitudes toward migrants by performing ordinal mixed models.

Results
We found that men have a more restrictive attitude toward migration than women, which increases with age and is stronger with a child in the household. Attitude toward migrants is also more skeptical if migrants have a different ethnicity and are from poorer countries. Increasing education and religiousness are associated with a more positive attitude toward migrants, particularly toward migrants of different ethnicity and from poorer countries.

Discussion
Although migration flows are a hallmark of the human species, previous findings suggest that (pre-)historic migration flows were at times accompanied by conflict and violence, while at the same time, they insured survival by allowing cultural exchange and the avoidance of inbreeding. Accordingly, we assume that contemporary attitudes toward migration are rooted in our evolutionary past. We discuss the respective behavioral patterns from an evolutionary perspective, arguing that both—a negative attitude as well as openness—make sense.

Their speculative model is this:

From an evolutionary perspective, we would predict that men are more critical of migration than women, as particularly men may have faced a higher risk of death and injury and an increased competition for resources as a result of male dominated migration. Young women, on the other hand, could be expected to be less critical toward migrants as female dispersal was common in many populations. Furthermore, we would expect a more positive attitude toward migrants of those with a higher education, as education is also a sign of the availability of resources and thus reduced competition. Concerning religiousness, our expectations are less clear: On the one hand, we may expect a more open attitude toward strangers due to the integrative power of religions, but on the other hand, we could also expect a more negative attitude because of the rather inclusive character of religions.

In other words: historically, many human populations practiced patrilocalism (men stay, women migrate), which means that women would get traded or voluntarily leave their birth group to join some other group, which would in return get some of their women. Anthropologists estimate that about 70% of human cultures historically used this pattern. In recent times, core Westerners (Hajnal line) have practiced neolocalism where the new couple establishes a new residence apart from both prior households. Though this had more to do with households than leaving your ethnic group or clan behind.