After a couple of years with significantly more positive attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, this year's survey shows a decline to a level closer to the years before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We interpret this as partly reflecting a "normalization" of the focus on immigration. In most questions in the survey, there are clearly less positive attitudes towards immigrants compared to the previous year, which was a year with particularly positive responses.
However, the overall pattern is that attitudes towards immigrants and immigration are positive. Only a minority among the respondents believe that most immigrants are a source of insecurity or that they abuse social welfare systems. At the same time, most agree that immigrants enrich cultural life in Norway and that immigrants make a useful contribution to the Norwegian workforce.
For some questions, there is greater disagreement among the respondents. This includes the statement that immigrants should strive to become as similar to Norwegians as possible. On this question, which concerns the integration of immigrants, about half disagree, while a agree. The same applies to the question of how easy or difficult it should be for asylum seekers and refugees to obtain residence in Norway. Here, about half answer that they believe access to residence should remain as it is today. The shares who believe it should be easier and more difficult are roughly equal—18 and 19 percent, respectively.
The patterns we see in the survey are largely stable from previous surveys and are only subject to limited change from one year to the next. Changes over time are primarily in a more positive/liberal direction.
We furthermore see that contact with immigrants continues to increase. A large majority have contact with immigrants in one or more arena. Those in contact with immigrants in most cases report to have mainly positive experiences with the contact.
As in previous surveys, we see that attitudes towards immigrants and immigration vary according to the respondents' background characteristics. Many of these factors are fairly consistent across the surveys: women, younger people, and students tend to be more positive than men, the elderly, and those on welfare or retirees. We see the clearest correlations between attitudes and the degree of contact with immigrants and the level of education of the respondents. These characteristics seem to underlie some of the other differences we see among respondents when comparing attitudes according to characteristics. People who live in urban areas often have more positive attitudes than those who live in rural areas. However, in this year's survey, we see that people in urban areas are somewhat more likely to agree that most immigrants are a source of insecurity than we have seen previously.
A new background characteristic included in the analysis in this year's survey, is the respondents' income. Higher income appears to be associated with more positive attitudes to some of the statements in the survey. However, some of these differences seems to be related to the respondents’ economic activity status and different levels of education between income groups.
The gross sample for this survey is drawn to provide, as far as possible, a statistically representative sample of the target population. Due to non-responses, biases may arise in the net sample. This is compensated for by using drop-out weights based on gender, age, and education.
Chapter 2 provides a more detailed description of the data. In Chapter 3, we look at some events and development trends in society that might influence attitudes towards immigrants and immigration in this year's survey. Chapter 4 presents the main results from the survey, with an emphasis on the long-term changes that have occurred in the period from 2002 to 2024. In chapter 5 the development of the last year is discussed, with focus on those changes that are statistically significant. In chapter 6, we take a closer look at attitudes by background characteristics of the respondents. Here we look at both bivariate and multivariate relations.