Cognitive Dissonance On The Socio-economic Impact Of Immigration In UK

Migration is an important feature of human society in the era of globalization.This phenomenon has promoted the flow of production factors and is beneficial to the cultural dissemination and exchanges.In recent years,with the progress of the regional integration,Europe,whose social economy is gradually flourishing,is increasingly troubled by a large number of immigrants.Migration has become a vital issue in the policy realm as well.The immigrant issue of the U.K.is typical.The social governance of the U.K.had been seriously tested by several factors.One is the great quantity of Central and Eastern European migrants,which is brought by the EU’s eastward expansion.Another is the refugee crisis,which is arisen from the unrest in West Asia and North Africa.In addition,the non-traditional security issues such as the European sovereign debt crisis and ethnic extremism also have impacts on the social governance.The United Kingdom is a traditional migrant country which believes in the multiculturalism.It used to own a variety of overseas colonies.Moreover,it had transformed from an emigrant country to an immigrant one.Likewise,the attitudes and the cognition towards immigrants of British society had gone through the process of opening inclusiveness to intensification.A series of problems that immigrants brought to the British society,had not only increased the burden on the public service system,but also had shocked the British labor market and the social mainstream culture.Towards the phenomenon above,the British society had obvious cognitive dissonance in contrast to the immigration policy makers(the British Government).However,this kind of cognitive dissonance shapes the development of British immigration policy and the reality of immigrant issue via the interaction among the social public opinion,public debate and policy-making.The question consciousness of this research is:whether the impact of immigrants on British society is positive or negative?What is the view of British society on this issue?Is there cognitive dissonance between the subjective impression and the objective reality?What is the intersubjective cognitive dissonance towards the immigrant issue between the people and the government?Because it’s difficult to strictly define the influence of immigrants on culture and security,this paper taking the U.K.as example,hopes to study on the impact of immigrants on social economy and the formation mechanism of British immigrant cognitive dissonance from the perspective of political psychology.Political psychology focuses on the process of two-way interaction between human psychology and social phenomena.In the immigration study,it’s very instructive to explain the immigrant issue through introducing the concept and method of political psychology.This article firstly elaborates the cognition of British society towards the concept of immigration and the status of immigrants from the perspective of history and policy research.Under different circumstances,the British government had different definitions for the immigration.Therefore,people were even more confused in terms of the changing concept of immigration.What’s worse,different types of opinion polls and the widespread of their results had aggravated this kind of chaos.With the time clues,analyzing the properties such as the number and characteristic of the British immigrants also lays the factual foundation for the research.Secondly,this paper explores and studies on the attitudes and cognition of the British society on immigrant problems through the summary and analysis of cases,poll data and the existing research.It was found that the cognition of the British people was very inaccurate towards the immigrant concept.A considerable number of people had a negative view about the immigrant groups and their socio-economic impact,and this kind of negative attitude had great differences due to the different characteristics of the cognitive subjects.Combined with the summary of the immigration policy and thought of the British government,we can make several inferences as follows.First,the cognition of British people towards the economic development had affected their attitudes of the immigrants.Second,the continuous adjustment of immigration policy had aggravated the differentiation of people’s cognitive dissonance on the immigrants.Third,the cognitive dissonance of the British people on pluralism was gradually converging as a resurgence of nationalism.Fourth,the British government was temporarily unable to balance the public’s cognition dissonance of the immigration policy.Then the paper made a specific analysis to the impact of immigrants on the British social economy from the three aspects of finance,labor market and policy model.It had showed that the British society has exaggerated the negative influence of immigrants on the the fiscal of the UK’s government and labor markets,and in a long run,the high level of immigration will have a positive effect on the UK’s economic development and labor structure.At last,due to the limitations of the rationalist explanation,this research provides three explanatory paths for the formation mechanism of cognitive dissonance in the UK’s immigrant issue under the guidance of social psychology.First,from the perspective of the theory of social identity,the cognitive dissonance of immigrant groups is derived from the differences in the definition of the immigrant groups and the their national identity,which is based on the preference of in-groups and the bias of the out-groups.Another significant reason that forms the bias is the different recognition degree of the British society on the permeability of the group boundaries and the mobility of social class.Second,from the viewpoint of the ethnic conflict psychology,it’s a sort of ethnic bias even discrimination that the British society has the cognitive dissonance towards the socio-economic impact on immigrants.This kind of discrimination stems from the excessive and exaggerated resource competition relations between the in-groups and the out-groups,also the internal class differentiation of the in-groups.The aggravation of the competition and the degree of differentiation may lead to the ethnic conflict as well.Third,the existence and solidification of stereotype is a vital reason for not easily breaking the cognitive dissonance of immigrants.The mass media plays a crucial role in the formation and reversal of stereotype,but the cognitive disorder occurred during the process of reversing the impression is further set up a barrier for removing the bias.