Are terrorists responsible for anti-immigrant sentiments? Evidence from Europe

Anti-immigrant sentiments are rising across the globe, influencing electoral results, economic policies, labour market outcomes, and even businesses. The factors influencing such sentiments range from socio-economic to cultural. In this paper, I study the impact of one such random shock – terrorism, on anti-immigrant attitudes. I utilise the variation in time and location of terrorist attacks to identify their effect. For this, I analyse the opinions of more than 250,000 individuals belonging to 32 European countries over the period 2002 to 2019. I find that there is around 4 percent decrease on average in an individual’s pro-immigrant attitudes after foreigners have carried out terrorist attacks in their country. But this detrimental effect disappears after 6 months and is more localised. My findings imply that inspite of being a relatively rare experience, exposure to terrorism can briefly prejudice an individual against immigrants, but only when the perpetrator(s) is of a different nationality. This can be helpful in understanding the factors leading to increased animosity against migrants.