Moving to Diversity: Residential Mobility, Changes in Ethnic Diversity, and Concerns About Immigration

Abstract

Studies on ethnic diversity and social cohesion are predominantly cross-sectional. Relying on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and applying a differences-in-differences design, this paper investigates how the event of moving to a more or less diverse neighbourhood affects people's opinions about immigration up. This longitudinal design not only excludes reverse causality, but also renders unobserved heterogeneity a very unlikely alternative explanation. We show that individuals who move to a more diverse neighborhood are about 13% more likely to become very concerned about immigration. This effect remains even three years after the move. Because individuals who move to equal or lower diversity neighborhoods do not change their attitudes, it is not the event of moving as such that makes people more negative towards out-groups. Moreover, this study is the first to investigate whether previous experiences with diversity eliminate any threat effects of moving to a more diverse place. Interestingly, our results lend only partial support for this hypothesis, since those who to the top 15 per cent most diverse neighborhoods generally do not change their views. We consider whether this particular null-effect might be due to 'threat immunity' of such movers. Our sensitivity analyses questions this objection and instead suggests that populations often thought to be immune to threat seem to respond similarly.2

Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes in Large European Cities: Contextual or Compositional Effects?

“…For immigration attitudes, van Heerden and Ruedin (2019) find that as the percentage of immigrants in the neighborhood increases over time, there are more positive attitudes about immigrants in the Netherlands. In addition, Lancee and Schaeffer (2015) find that moving to neighborhoods with greater ethnic heterogeneity causes more negative immigration attitudes in Germany. In this article, I find no evidence that urban contexts cause more positive immigration attitudes in Swiss cities or in German neighborhoods.…”

“…If contextual effects shape the attitudes of movers, then attitudes should become more positive after moving to large cities, relative to people who do not move to large cities. This comparison accounts for the fact that attitudes may change over time for many reasons, but that geographic context effects can be isolated by comparing the attitudinal time trends of people who move and people who do not move (Lancee and Schaeffer 2015). Contextual effects may also shape the attitudes of people who spend their entire lives in large cities through long-term political socialization that began early in life (Sapiro 2004).…”

Contextual Effects of Immigrant Presence on Populist Radical Right Support: Testing the “Halo Effect” on Front National Voting in France

“…Recent studies such as Savelkoul et al (2017) also suggest that the effect of neighborhood ethnic composition on voting for the radical right may be conditional on the size of the immigrant population, identifying an empirical threshold of 15 per cent of the total neighborhood population. In their analysis of residential mobility, Lancee and Schaeffer (2015) use an arbitrary cut point, defining the 15% most diverse neighborhoods in Germany as high-diversity areas, while taking diversity levels below the median (50%) to reflect more homogeneous neighborhoods.…”

How attitudes towards immigrants are shaped by residential context: The role of ethnic diversity dynamics and immigrant visibility

“…We have constructed a new data set that includes detailed geo-spatial information and individual level attitudes over time (compare Savelkoul et al, 2011). The methodological advantage of dynamic data is that it allows a better control of selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity than studies that rely on repeated crosssections (Lancee and Schaeffer, 2015).…”