Not in My Backyard: Do Increases in Immigration Cause Political Violence?

IPL Working Paper No. 18-02, 2018

36 Pages Posted: 15 Jan 2019

See all articles by Moritz Marbach

Moritz Marbach

ETH Zürich - Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (GESS)

Guido Ropers

University of Mannheim Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, Students

Date Written: December 27, 2018

Abstract

While far-right parties profit electorally from rising immigration, we know very little about how increases in immigration mobilize opposition outside the electoral arena. Using fine-grained, classified data from the Federal Criminal Office in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of a sizable increase in asylum-seekers in a community on the probability of xenophobic hate crimes. Exploiting county-level quota regimes governing the allocation of asylum-seekers in Germany, we find that when immigration levels rise nationally, an increase in asylum-seeker arrivals in a community causes an increase in xenophobic hate crimes. We also document that these crimes are directed against asylum-seekers and not other non-natives, which suggests that they are instrumental actions intended to dispel and deter asylum-seekers from local communities.

Keywords: immigration, refugees, hate crimes

JEL Classification: P16, D72, J68

Suggested Citation

Marbach, Moritz and Ropers, Guido, Not in My Backyard: Do Increases in Immigration Cause Political Violence? (December 27, 2018). IPL Working Paper No. 18-02, 2018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3310352 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3310352

Moritz Marbach (Contact Author)

ETH Zürich - Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (GESS) ( email )

Haldeneggsteig 4
Zurich, Zurich 8006
Switzerland

Guido Ropers

University of Mannheim Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, Students ( email )

Mannheim
Germany

HOME PAGE: http://guidoropers.com

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