The Effect of Communism on People’s Attitudes Toward Immigration

This is a paper about the impact of socio-economic conditions in East Germany on the  perception of immigration.

ABSTRACT

Does living in a communist regime make a person more concerned about immigration? This paper argues conceptually and demonstrates empirically that people’s attitudes toward immigration are affected by their country’s politico-economic legacy. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment arising from the historic division of Germany into East and West, I show that former East Germans, because of their exposure to communism, are notably more likely to be very concerned about immigration than former West Germans. Opposite of what existing literature finds, higher educational attainment in East Germany actually increases concerns. Further, I find that the effect of living in East Germany is driven by former East Germans who were born during, and not before, the communist rule and that differences in attitudes persist even after Germany’s reunification. People’s trust in strangers and contact with foreigners represent two salient channels through which communism affects people’s preferences toward immigration.

Conclusion 

This paper presents the first analysis on the effect of a country’s politico-economic legacy on people’s attitudes toward immigration. Using the quasi-natural experiment of the postwar division of Germany into two countries with vastly different politico-economic institutions, I identify the causal effect of communism on attitudes toward immigration. The results show that communism’s effect on people’s immigration attitudes is noteworthy in magnitude and robust to an array of economic and non-economic individual-level determinants of attitudes toward immigration.

The main results provide empirical evidence that having lived in a communist regime increases the probability that a person is very concerned about immigration by 0.044. Critically, I find that high educational attainment in a communist regime actually increases people’s concerns about immigration, a result that is opposite of what has been shown in the attitudes toward immigration literature. Further, the results indicate that attitudes among former East and West Germans have not converged since reunification, a finding consistent with evidence in development psychology and the socialization theory that preferences developed early in life will persist. Also in line with this conceptual framework, I find that the effect of communism is most pronounced among individuals who were born in the regime, while former East Germans who were born before communist rule express considerably less concern about immigration than the generations that followed. Finally, I find that two conceptually and empirically salient channels for the observed effect of communism on attitudes toward immigration are people’s level of trust in strangers and contact with foreigners.

A limitation of this study, given the available data, is that I am unable to differentiate between German attitudes toward specific subgroups of immigration—for example, how Germans feel about a particular ethnic or religious immigrant group—or toward immigrants more generally. Given that the large-scale migration wave facing the world today is composed primarily of Muslim immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, future research should investigate whether attitudes toward immigration are sensitive to the faces and cultures constituting the immigration phenomenon. Such studies are of great contemporary interest and relevance considering Germany’s long-standing history of Turkish immigration and its recent political decision to welcome over one million refugees. Nonetheless, this paper offers novel empirical insights and contributes to ongoing discourse about immigration policy and the enduring effects of communism on people’s preferences.