Do counties with more foreign-born residents make asylum seekers feel more welcome?
Do counties with more foreign-born residents make asylum seekers feel more welcome?
Image Jazzmany. Syrian parents meeting at Munich central station, 15 years after
OSC Scientific Seminar 2020-2021
Friday, 5th February 2021, 4:30 pm / 6 pm (Zoom videoconference)
Do counties with more foreign-born residents make asylum seekers
feel more welcome?
Rahsaan Maxwell
Professor, Department of Political Science,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Europe is struggling with the largest wave of asylum seekers since World War II, but we know little about asylum seekers' perspectives on their integration. In this presentation, we explore whether asylum seekers feel more welcome when they live in communities with more foreign-born residents.
Existing research suggests migrant integration often varies across space, but is difficult to interpret because migrant selection into localities is often correlated with integration.
We leverage the as-if random assignment of asylum seekers to German counties, which permits credible inferences about contextual effects.
Our central finding is that asylum seekers feel more welcome in counties with more foreign-born residents and the effect is stronger when asylum seekers and foreign-born residents have similar origins.
Our results suggest networks cannot explain these findings, and that general atmospheres are a more likely mechanism. This has implications for our understanding of asylum seeker integration and contextual effects more broadly.
Registration is mandatory to join the ZOOM meeting (the link will be sent one day before)
