Is there a policy backlash to non-white refugees? Differential reactions to the 2015 European refugee “crisis” and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine underscore the unequal treatment experienced by forcibly displaced persons. While states have long resisted taking in refugees that they perceive to be racially undesirable, they often make exceptions for those deemed more desirable. Case-specific evidence suggests that states respond to the former by enacting restrictive policies and to the latter by creating new pathways for temporary and permanent immigration. However, no systematic tests exist of this proposition. I pair a regression discontinuity analysis of two population-based surveys with a time-series cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between large refugee inflows and migration policy changes from 1968 to 2013, finding support for my argument. Exposure to non-white refugees leads states to enact more restrictive policies and triggers public support for those restrictions. Exposure to white refugees produces the opposite result. These findings corroborate a growing literature on racial inequality in international politics.

Anti-immigrant prejudice persists throughout the world. Many scholars assert that this prejudice is higher among those who strongly identify with their nation. We complicate this conventional theory, asking whether national identity can be activated to reduce xenophobia. Specifically, we investigate whether connecting immigration with an institution closely tied to national identity can reduce anti-immigrant sentiment among strong national identifiers. Using evidence from two survey experiments of United Kingdom citizens, we show that priming immigration within the National Health Service reduces support for anti-immigrant policies and anti-immigrant sentiment. Importantly, this effect is larger for the strongest national identifiers and persists regardless of whether immigrants are framed as high- or low-skill workers. Further this relationship is unique to the NHS as opposed to private healthcare markets. These results have significant implications for the value of highlighting the importance of immigration as a means to mollify anti-immigrant prejudice in the Global North.

For decades, many scholars and policymakers have presumed that immigration diminishes social capital by eroding social solidarity and weakening community ties, particularly when immigrants come from culturally different backgrounds. Such concerns have led to calls for limiting immigration despite the economic arguments that highlight the contribution of immigrants to economic development and other outcomes. However, extant work that implicates a negative relationship between immigration and social capital tends to either make this claim by fiat or use a limited selection of case studies. In this project, I use county-level and survey data from the United States, as well as a novel instrumental variable design, to examine this relationship. The findings challenge the prevailing assumptions about immigration’s negative effect on social capital. I find that immigration bolsters social capital, rather than diminishes it, which calls into question existing social fears that immigrants will cause society’s social ties to fray. This study offers important insights for policymakers and scholars interested in the political, social, and economic consequences of immigration.

This paper looks at the impact of legacies of previous periods of violent authoritarian rule on post-unification, anti-foreigner violence in Germany. Extant work reveals the distribution of violent incidents is more concentrated in the new Bundesländer, which joined the Federal Republic in October 1990. Can differences in regime histories explain these disparate patterns of anti-foreigner violence in contemporary Germany? We address this question using novel data on anti-foreigner violence. While controlling for the usual correlates of anti-foreigner behavior (contact, economic performance) we specifically explore whether the distinct Bundesländer regime histories have an impact on post-unification levels of anti-foreigner violence. First, we consider whether different approaches to coming to terms with past in the FRG and the DDR can explain different patterns of anti-foreigner violence. Whereas the FRG went through a wrenching process of coming to terms with the past, which produced a widespread “culture of contrition,” the regime in the East swept the Nazi past under the rug, claiming that the SED represented the anti-Nazi current in German political culture. Second, we consider whether support for the Nazi party, as a measure of local historical xenophobia, in the late Weimar period translates into anti-foreigner violence in the post-unification era. The areas of interwar Germany which became the DDR, exhibited patterns of strong Red vs. Brown polarization in the Weimar area, whereas voting patterns in Western Germany were less polarized with higher levels of support for the moderate parties of the center-left and center-right.

Does emigration cause a brain drain? The conventional wisdom suggests that emigration decreases human capital, particularly in poor states. However, others find that emigration produces a brain gain because migration prospects incentivize investment in education. This debate is at an impasse because extant work neglects the role of political regimes. To this end, I use individual-level and cross-sectional data to test the role that sending-state political conditions play in the brain drain/gain. I find that liberal democratic institutions moderate the effect of skilled emigration on human capital accumulation. On the one hand, autocratic institutions make emigrating more attractive. Under these conditions, citizens seek out education because high skilled migrants are more likely to get visas to move abroad. On the other hand, these incentives are not present in states that are committed to the rule of law, participatory democracy, and that protect the freedom of religion. This study mollifies concerns about the brain drain because it shows that the most vulnerable countries stand to gain the most from more open borders. It also highlights how emigration opportunities create incentives for individuals to acquire more education that lead to greater individual well-being, which destabilizes the state-centric frame of the brain drain.

Both scholars and interested observers of international politics share the intuitive sense that “leaders matter” in determining the onset and prevention of war. Much of the international relations literature on this question, however, has struggled to identify systematic causal effects. The difficulty in identifying the causal impact of leaders on the outbreak of war is primarily rooted in two issues: 1) the measurement of individual characteristics at a distance, and 2) the confounding of leadership characteristics with other national and international covariates in observational data. We propose a method for overcoming these problems through the online experimental analysis of crisis bargaining. We construct an online simulacrum for crisis bargaining that captures many of the key features of this literature while avoiding some of the important shortcomings of typical behavioral economics games for the study of war. Game instructions and screen shots of gameplay are included in our appendices. Next, we identify a key individual leadership characteristic - narcissism - and theorize its expected impact on play in our game. We then conduct computer simulations of game play based upon randomized assignment of narcissistic and non-narcissistic leaders to different simulated international systems. Our analysis of the simulated data illustrates the viability of our approach and provides hypotheses for the impact of leadership narcissism at the system level. At the same time, our results also highlight the importance of careful theorizing about causal process when examining treatment effects in a complex and strategic context.