Using survey data from 2,070 residents of the Greek islands, Hangartner et al. look at how exposure to the refugee crisis has affected attitudes. They compare residents of islands that received any refugees during the crisis to residents of islands that did not, and use an instrumental variables approach. Their instrument is the distance of the island to the Turkish coast, which would be expected to affect the likelihood that an island receives refugees, but shouldn't affect attitudes directly (especially after controlling for a bunch of other variables in their analysis). They find that:
...direct exposure to the refugee crisis has statistically and politically meaningful effects on natives’ exclusionary attitudes, preferences over asylum and immigration policies, and political engagement. Exploiting the exogenous variation in refugee arrivals caused by distance to the Turkish coast — our instrument — we find that respondents directly exposed to the refugee crisis experience a 1/4 standard deviation (SD) increase in their anti-asylum seeker and anti-immigrant attitudes as well as a 1/6 SD increase in their anti-Muslim attitudes. Compared to respondents on unexposed islands, they are more likely to oppose hosting additional asylum seekers and to support the ban from school for asylum seekers’ children and are less likely to donate to UNHCR and to sign a petition that lobbies the government to provide better housing for refugees.In other words, it's all bad news. Looking into the reasons for their results, they can exclude economic concerns:
...because refugees quickly left the islands for other European countries, the usual materialist concerns that immigrants compete with natives over scarce resources such as jobs or welfare benefits... do also not apply in this context.So, it was the mere exposure to the crisis itself that led to these changes in attitudes. Most worryingly, it appears that these attitudinal changes had some persistence over time, because the survey was conducted in early 2017, nearly a year after the refugee crisis had abated.
Hangartner et al. put their results down to:
The inability of the local and European authorities to effectively manage the refugee flows and provide medical support and sanitary services caused chaotic scenes at the hotspots and sparked concerns about the spread of diseases.That at least suggests that better handling of the situation could have avoided the worst effects. However, it is speculative, since we don't know what would have happened had the crisis been more effectively dealt with. There are two other conclusions from the research that are also worrying:
Our findings of a uniform effect of exposure to the refugee crisis across the sample suggest that this threat triggered exclusionary reactions not only among those already predisposed against immigration, but also among respondents who otherwise would exhibit inclusionary attitudes and have not voted for (extreme) right-wing parties in the past...
...we find that exposure to large numbers of asylum seekers causes natives to become more hostile not only toward refugees, but also toward economic migrants and Muslims, including native Muslims who have been residing in Greece for centuries.The effects were generalised in the population, and had negative spillovers on attitudes to other out-groups. It may take some time for these effects to dissipate.
However, not all studies show bad news. This 2014 article by Alpaslan Akay (University of Gothenburg), Amelie Constant (George Washington University), and Corrado Giulietti (Institute for the Study of Labor, Germany), published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (ungated earlier version here), looks at the impact of immigration on subjective wellbeing (life satisfaction, measured on a 1-10 scale) of native-born Germans. Using 170,000 observations from the German Socio-Economic Panel survey over the period from 1998 to 2009, they find that:
...an increase of one standard deviation in the immigrant share [in the local labour market area] is associated with an increase of 0.142 standard deviations in natives’ [subjective wellbeing]. This is rather a large effect if one considers that the standardized coefficient for being unemployed is −0.112 and for wage is 0.017.Local unemployment and GDP don't seem to affect the results, so again there isn't an economic (or labour market) explanation for these results. When they dig a bit further, it is satisfaction with housing (and not satisfaction with job, health, or income) that seems to be driving the overall result.
Despite some attempts by the authors to argue otherwise, it isn't clear to me that these results are necessarily causal - perhaps immigrants are simply more likely to move to areas where people are happier. However, the results are at least suggestive, because the natives are happier where there are more immigrants, but the immigrants are not.
It would be interesting to see some further results on subjective wellbeing after the refugee crisis. The Hangartner et al. results suggest a dramatic change in attitudes following the crisis in an area that the refugees are simply transiting through. It would be interesting (and important for policy purposes) to know whether that effect spills over to their ultimate destinations.
[HT for the Hangartner et al. article: Marginal Revolution, back in January 2019]
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