Refugees, Local Backlash and East-Germany

The German government's policy to shelter thousands of refugees from the Middle East has let to heavy, violent backlash in some German regions. In 2015 alone, about 500 refugee shelters have been attacked. Exploiting local-level policy variation in the distribution of refugees across German counties, original fine-grained data and a tailored Bayesian model-based causal inference approach, we estimate the causal response function that describes the relationship between local immigrant-native conflict and the size of the refugee population. Our preliminary estimates reveal that attacks and protests against refugee shelters are only weakly increasing in the size of the refugee population. We also study the variation of the causal response function across German regions. Here we find large differences between East and West, but more importantly, also within East Germany. Drawing from the literature on political representation and terrorism, we discuss potential explanations for our findings.