The Determinants of Attitudes, Preferences, Perceptions, and Identities of Migrants and Natives

Abstract

This dissertation consists of four chapters which study how external events influence attitudes, preferences, perceptions, and identities of migrants and natives in different settings. The first chapter examines the effects of the European Refugee Crisis between 2014 and 2015 on the ethnic identity of already resident migrants in Germany. Thereby, I exploit the quasi-experimental setting in Germany, by which refugees are allocated to different counties by state authorities without being able to choose their locations themselves. Doing so, I find that higher shares of refugees in a county increased migrants’ attachment to their home countries, but not their perceived belonging to Germany. Further analyses uncover strong heterogeneities with respect to country of origin and suggest that concerns about xenophobia, experiences of discrimination, and the consumption of foreign media contributed to these effects. Lastly, I find that changes in ethnic identity coincide with the political polarization of migrants. The second chapter looks at the effects of far-right protests in Germany on natives’ attitudes toward migration nationwide. More specifically, we test whether protesters are able to raise support for their concerns, or whether they are perceived as a threat by the public. To do so, we perform a regression discontinuity design approach to estimate short-term effects on natives’ worries about xenophobia and concerns about immigration. Results indicate that protesters were seen as a threat as worries about xenophobia increased while concerns about immigration remained flat after demonstrations took place. Further analyses indicate that media coverage was essential in driving results and that effects were highly dependent on people’s preexisting political views, suggesting that protests had polarizing effects. In the third chapter, we study how unemployment impacts bitterness, which describes a feeling of not having achieved what one deserves compared to others. After finding consistently positive effects using pooled OLS and fixed effects regressions, we identify the causal effect of unemployment on bitterness by exploiting variation from plant closures and firm layoffs in Germany. Combining matching based on entropy balancing with difference-in-differences estimation, we show that unemployment leads to a substantial and significant increase in bitterness. Further analyses uncover evidence that the experience of job loss, the state of being unemployed, and the duration of unemployment contribute separately to overall effects. Lastly, we find some evidence that effects persist over time. In Chapter 4, we analyze how changes in legal status affect perceived discrimination of migrants in Germany. Hereby, we follow two distinct approaches. First, studying the direct impact of naturalization, we estimate a fixed effects model. As this method cannot fully account for all potential sources of endogeneity, we thereafter exploit exogenous variation in residency requirements due to two citizenship reforms in Germany. Overall, we find that while naturalization does appear to reduce perceptions of discrimination overall, these effects are limited to men and immigrants from Eastern European countries. Extending the analysis, we exploit exogenous variation from EU enlargement to show that citizens from countries that became part of the EU experienced a significant reduction in discrimination compared to non-EU immigrants.