Pane e Cioccolata: The Impact of Native Attitudes on Return Migration

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu ABSTRACT Pane e Cioccolata: The Impact of Native Attitudes on Return Migration * This paper addresses the link between native attitudes and return migration. We exploit the variation in xenophobia using information on media consumption by migrants in Italy. A widely documented crime provides a quasi-experimental setting to identify the impact of Italian attitudes on migrants' settlement intentions. Our results suggest a significant effect of anti-immigrant attitudes on the intended duration of stay in the host country. The impact is more pronounced for low-skilled migrants, which has consequences for how migration affects the long run convergence between sending and destination countries. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARYIn this paper we investigate the impact of native attitudes on return intention of immigrants. We use a situation where immigrants have been exposed to particularly hostile media coverage following a tragic murder in Roma (Italy) at the end of the year 2007. Our main result is that immigrants react fast by curtailing their intentions to stay following hostile media coverage. Our headlines result is a decrease of 10 percentage points in intention to stay following the media coverage of the murder. Immigrants revising downwards their intention to stay are predominantly those not exposed to negative media feedbacks before the event. And we also found that less skilled migrants were revising their intentions to stay much more than more highly skilled migrants. JEL Classification:F22, J61

Remigration Intentions and Migrants' Behavior

“…The idea is that if migrants think that discrimination in France is widespread, they are certainly more likely to be willing to leave or return to their home country. de Coulon et al (2016) confirmed this in a recent quasi-experimental setting (i.e. the media coverage of a particularly tragic murder committed by a Romanian immigrant in Italy).…”

Remigration intentions and migrants' behavior

“…10 As argued by Wilde (2000) and similarly by Greene (2008), identification is achieved through functional form in recursive bivariate models. 11 However, we still include exclusion restriction X i to provide plausibly exogenous variation in remigration intentions, R i . Our coefficient of interest is β 1 capturing the impact of remigration intentions on the outcome.…”

The Effect of Attitudes Toward Migrants on Migrant Skill Composition

“…To the best of my knowledge, the only three studies that mention the possible effects of attitudes toward migrants on the skill level of migrants are Coulon et al (2016), Knabe et al (2013) and Slotwinski and Stutzer (2015). While these papers focus on single countries, I take a cross-country approach.…”