Shipwrecks, Terrorist Attacks and Asylum Decisions

• In Event: The Politics of Asylum Seekers and Refugees

Abstract

Did the media coverage of the 2015 refugee crisis affect asylum decisions? To answer this question, I combine administrative data from the French asylum office on 8,000 asylum applications with synopses of prime time television news broadcast. I leverage exogenous variation in the timing of news stories to measure the impact of two types of news stories on asylum decisions migrants' shipwrecks on the one hand and of terrorist attacks on the other hand. I find that bureaucrats are more (less) generous the day after a migrant shipwreck (terrorist attack) was featured in the news. In both cases, the effects are short lived – they last only a day – and temporary – they are concentrated in the first year of the refugee crisis.

Author

• Mathilde Emeriau, Stanford University