Suchergebnisse

After the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish conflict, 1.2 million Greek Orthodox were forcibly displaced from Turkey to Greece, increasing the host population by 20 percent within a few months. Refugees were pro-vided with farmland, new houses and schools, and were granted the Greek citizenship. This paper analyses the long-term social integration of refugees and the effect of their resettlement on social cohesion. Combining historical and modern population censuses and surveys, this paper finds that, by the 2000s, refugees display a high rate of intermarriage with Greek natives, report levels of trust in others and in institutions similar to natives, and exhibit higher political and civic participation. At the community level, places with a higher share of refugees in 1928 are more likely to have at least one sport association 80 years later. There is no impact on political fragmentation nor on crime. The historical refugees' integration starkly contrasts with the social marginalization of recent Albanian immigrants who, unlike the former, neither spoke Greek nor had the same religion as locals upon arrival. These results suggest that early investments in inclusion policies can be effective at fostering refugees' assimilation, at least when newcomers and locals have similar cultural profiles.

I examine the effect of immigrant inflows in Europe on natives' individual attitudes towards redistribution and immigration policy over the last decade. Unlike previous studies, I analyze the evolution over time of these two types of attitudes in a joint empirical framework. Using migration data at the NUTS regional level from the European Labor Force Survey and individual attitudes data from the European Social Survey, I exploit variation over time and across regions in the size and composition of immigrant inflows. I address the endogeneity of immigrant inflows by using a shift share instrument and within-country specification. I find evidence coherent with a theoretical model in which individual attitudes depend essentially on how immigration is perceived to affect wages and net welfare benefits. Specifically, I find that, when immigrants tend to compete with natives for jobs (due to having similar skills or occupations), natives prefer policies that support welfare and put restrictions on migration. When migrants are mostly low-skilled (high-skilled), European citizens typically favor lower (higher) levels of redistribution.

We examine the relationship between immigration and preferences for redistribution in Europe using a newly assembled dataset of immigrant stocks for 140 regions in 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native respondents display lower support for redistribution when the share of immigrants in their residence region is higher. This negative association is driven by regions of countries with relatively large welfare states and by respondents at the center or at the right of the political spectrum. It is stronger when immigrants originate from Middle-Eastern or Eastern European countries, are less skilled than natives and experience more residential segregation. These results are unlikely to be driven by immigrants' endogenous location choices, that is, by welfare magnet effects or by immigrants' sorting into regions with better economic opportunities. They are also robust to instrumenting immigration using a standard shift-share approach. ; Hillel Rapoport acknowledges support by a French government subsidy managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the framework of the Investissements d'Avenir, program reference ANR-17-EURE-001.

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native respondents display lower support for redistribution when the share of immigrants in their residence region is higher. This negative association is driven by regions of countries with relatively large Welfare States and by respondents at the center or at the right of the political spectrum. The effects are also stronger when immigrants originate from Middle-Eastern countries, are less skilled than natives, and experience more residential segregation. These results are unlikely to be driven by immigrants' endogenous location choices.