The Backlash of Free Movement: Does Internal EU Migration Fuel Anti-Immigration Views?

The free movement of workers is a fundamental principle of the EU, but it can pose a major threat to segments of the labor market, fuel anti-immigrant views, and influences the welfare state support (Kroh 2005, Mau & Burkhardt 2009, Eger 2010). As much of the existing literature draws on cross-national inferences, the causal effect of immigration on public attitudes is still under debate. Merging register-based annual migration statistics at the level of municipalities in the past 20 years with panel data on individuals’ attitudes in Germany, UK, and Switzerland, and exploiting exogenous variation in the stepwise enlargement of the of Free Movement to East Europe, allows us to establish causal estimates of changing local EU internal migration numbers on attitudes. The analysis reconciles conflicting evidence provided by previous research and contributes to the current debate on the rise of populist movements as well as Anti-EU sentiments.