Etienne Bacher, Michel Beine & Hillel Rapoport
, 2025. "Do Anti-immigration Attitudes Discourage Immigration? Evidence from a New Instrument,"
CEPII Working Paper 2025-
13
, October 2025 , CEPII.
We investigate the effect of anti-immigration attitudes on immigration plans to Europe. We propose a new instrument for attitudes toward immigration, namely, the number of country nationals killed in terrorist attacks taking place outside of Europe. Our first-stage results confirm that such terrorist attacks increase negative attitudes to immigration in the origin country of the victims. Our second-stage results then show that this higher hostility toward migrants decreases the attractiveness of the country for prospective immigrants.
Immigration ; Terrorism ; Anti-immigration attitudes ; Europe