The attitudes of workers in commercial sector for immigrants: Individual and collective interest or Symbolic Racism?

The first part of the article highlights that immigration to modern Greece is an actual and mainly ongoing social phenomenon. By identifying economic survival as the main cause of immigration, those who come to our country are identified as "economic immigrants", who are estimated to constitute 10% of Greece's labor force. The presence of this new workforce is disturbing the balance not only in the labor, but also in the economic, social and political sectors of our country.

This study is part of the research project "Athens and Immigration: "We" and "Others", "Others" and "Us" of the National Centre for Social Research. It aims at qualitatively investigating the impact of the presence of immigrants on the perceptions of Greeks employed in the commercial sector and is spatially limited to the historical triangle of Athens, a long-standing important commercial pole of the capital.

The subject of this article is to understand this ambivalent attitude of the Greeks through the theoretical framework of Symbolic Racism. According to Symbolic Racism, this article methodologically approaches the analysis of the attitudes of workers in the commercial sector towards immigrants through two research questions:

1) What is the attitude of the respondents towards immigrants and immigrants’ entrepreneurs?

2) Is it personal / collective interest that affects this attitude or a symbolic moral discrimination against immigrants?