Ethnic Hostility among Ethnic Majority and Minority Groups

7. Educational Attainment and Ethnic Hostility | Conclusions
is positively related to opposition to ethnically mixed marriages and to identifi cation with the
country of origin for most distinguished ethnic categories as well. However, as with all crosssectional
research on contact theory, we must be cautious to interpret these relationships in a
causal manner.
Although higher educated migrants have more contact opportunities with native
Dutch than lower educated migrants, second generation Turks and Moroccans do not experience
more positive contact experiences and (together with second generation Surinamese) do not
experience less negative contact experiences the higher they are educated. Hostility among the
native population may be part of the reason for this. Although not excepted, this is in line with
previous research which demonstrated that not only low educated minorities face discrimination
at the labourmarket but high educated minorities as well (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Gras,
Bovenkerk, Gorter, Kruiswijk, & Ramsoedh, 1996). We tentatively conclude that, in the Netherlands,
ethnic hostility among native Dutch hampers the integration of especially second generation
migrants and especially of second generation Turks and Moroccans. The extent of which should be
subject of future research.
Previous scholars suggested that the negative effect of education on cultural integration
could be suppressed by national media usage, since the higher educated presumably consume
more Dutch media and Dutch media usage leads to negative meta-views (e.g. ‘They think we are
all criminals.’). This in turn would increase ethnic hostility and identifi cation with the country of
origin. We found only meager corroborative evidence for this causal mechanism. Higher educated
minorities generally consume more Dutch media usage than lower counterparts (second generation
Turks and Moroccans are exceptions to this general relationship). But for all ethnic groups, except
for second generation Moroccans, Dutch media usage interpreted and not suppressed the negative
effect of education on origin country identifi cation. Dutch media usage is thus foremost an
indicator of involvement with the host country and to a lesser extent a feeding source for ethnic
hostility, and this possibly only for second generation Moroccans.
Second generation migrants are less opposed to ethnically mixed relationships and
identify more with the Netherlands than their fi rst generation counterparts. However, educational
attainment does not have the expected negative impact on ethnic hostility among ethnic minorities
of second generational status. For second generation Turks and Moroccans this is somewhat
worrisome since these groups are still relatively opposed to ethnically mixed relationships, this in
contrast to second generation Surinamese and Antilleans who are fairly tolerant.
In this chapter we proposed to investigate the effect of education on opposition to
ethnically mixed relationships and for ethnic identifi cation. Opposition to mixed relationships
is closely related to ethnic distance and ethnic hostility. We therefore applied theories with
considerably merits in explaining both a wide array of indicators of ethnic hostility and in
explaining the salience of national identities; Ethnic Competition Theory and Contact Theory.
We conclude that for ethnic minority groups Ethnic Competition Theory turned out to be more
appropriate to explain group identifi cations than ethnic hostility. But all in all, the threat
mechanism could not be convincingly corroborated by our analyses. Within the contact theory
research tradition, to focus on the tenability of the mechanism among minority population and to
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