Refugees and Terrorism: The Conditioning Effect of Migration Policies

• In Event: Refugee Crises, Policies, and Violence against Refugees

Abstract

Fear of terrorism driven by immigration has radically polarized government agendas in many advanced countries. Claims for harder border controls and travel bans have become a divisive political issue. Strikingly, however, evidence on the impact of refugee inflows and border control on terrorist violence is scarce. In this paper we examine the impact of refugee inflows and policy on two different forms of terrorism: against host populations and refugees themselves. We rely on two empirical strategies. First, we draw on a novel and extensive time series cross-sectional dataset covering 35 OECD countries over 15 years, including refugee policies and the incidence of various types of terrorism. Second, we conduct a difference in differences analysis assessing the impact of Germany’s sudden and salient pro-refugee policy approach in 2015. Our preliminary analyses suggest that refugee inflows and restrictive border controls have insignificant effects on attacks against host populations by transnational terrorist groups. However, permissive refugee policies increase attacks against refugee populations. We explore the economic, cultural and political threat mechanisms behind our findings with a georeferenced dataset of anti-refugee violence in Germany.

Authors

• Sara Polo, University of Essex

• Julian Wucherpfennig, Hertie School of Governance