Large migrant inflows have spurred anti-immigrant sentiment, but can small inflows have a different impact? We exploit the redistribution of migrants after the dismantling of the ``Calais Jungle" in France to study the impact of the exposure to few m...
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Large migrant inflows have spurred anti-immigrant sentiment, but can small inflows have a different impact? We exploit the redistribution of migrants after the dismantling of the ``Calais Jungle" in France to study the impact of the exposure to few migrants. Using instrumental variables, we find that in the presence of a migrant center (CAO), the growth rate of vote shares for the main far-right party (Front National (FN), our proxy for anti-immigrant sentiment) between 2012 and 2017 is reduced by about 11.9 percentage points. Given that FN vote shares increased by 20\% on average between 2012 and 2017, this estimation suggests that the growth rate of FN votes in municipalities with a CAO was only 40\% compared to the increase in municipalities without a CAO (which corresponds to a 3.9 percentage points lower increase). These effects, which crucially depends on the inflow's size, point towards the contact hypothesis
(Allport 1954). Close