Essays on Immigration and Xenophobia

Abstract

This dissertation identifies drivers of xenophobic backlash against immigration. I study the case of Germany, a country in which -- as in many other advanced industrialized democracies -- increasing ethnic heterogeneity has been accompanied by rising levels of xenophobia over the past decades. In the first paper, I establish that local economic inequality is a key moderator of how local communities react to immigration inflows. Drawing on prior work at the cross-national level, I argue that inequality fosters a sense of relative deprivation among natives, increases incentives for national identification, and thereby amplifies xenophobic backlash against immigration. Using a difference in differences approach, I demonstrate that the relative increase in hate crimes following the 2015/2016 refugee inflow was substantially higher in high-inequality municipalities. In the second paper -- based on co-authored work with Daniel Bischof and Markus Wagner -- I shift focus to the everyday, dynamic drivers of xenophobia at the local level. Specifically, I establish a relationship between crimes attributed to immigrants and hate crimes against refugees at the local level. Using a regression discontinuity in time design (RDiT), I show that the daily probability of a hate crime against refugees rises sharply in the immediate aftermath of an immigrant-attributed crime event in a local community. In the third paper -- based on co-authored work with Hanno Hilbig -- I hone in on the sources of biased beliefs about immigrants. Combining a variety of data sources, I show that local news monopolies increase misperceptions about the size of the local immigrant population.