"Stand by those who share our values" – how the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan improved European attitudes toward immigration

Whether current events affect attitudes toward immigration and the magnitude and direction of these changes are frequently debated issues in the political science literature of recent years. Combining the literatures on the framing and priming of immigration and the deservingness of immigrants, I propose that attitudes are impacted most substantively when immigration-related topics are salient in the news and that the direction of change depends on whether the primed events are related to immigrants that are framed and perceived as deserving of acceptance or not. Analyzing the case of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in August 2021, I argue that refugees fleeing the country have been framed as highly vulnerable in their home country and highly assimilable in potential host countries, ergo, as highly deserving of help. I demonstrate this empirically with computational text analyses using BERTopic and sentiment analyses on rich text corpora consisting of social media and news archival data. In the next step, I show with a regression discontinuity design that this positive framing of refugees during a highly salient event has led to a significant immediate and long-term increase in pro-immigration attitudes across Europe.