Attitudinal predictors of potential illegal cross-border migration

Abstract

This paper reports on the relationship between attitudes toward illegal immigrants and illegal immigration, and people's private behavioural intention to immigrate illegally into a foreign country. The research was carried out in 2005, in Bulgaria, a country with a net emigration rate, using a sample of 505 undergraduate Bulgarian students (22.5% male; M age = 23.3; SD = 4.8). A pool of 78 items assessed attitudes toward undocumented immigrants and evaluation of illegal migration. These two measures were used to predict potential undocumented immigration. Based on a factor analysis six subscales were identified and labelled: improvement of life, moral evaluation, courage to live, failure experienced in own country, expectations of benefits from illegal migration, and right to immigrate. Results of a multiple regression analysis explained 62 percent of the variance of the behavioural intention to migrate illegally into a foreign country. The analysis yielded the following factors: attitudes to improve life (β = 0.35), the moral evaluation of illegal immigrants (β = -0.26), expectancies of benefits (β = -0.19), the courage of migrants (β = 0.10), and seeing illegal immigration as a right (β = 0.09), These findings support the hypothesis that attitudes may predict potential behaviour, the strongest predictor for undocumented migration being the urge to improve life, and moral evaluation of migrants.