Results for “refugee” 130 found
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile?
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives’ attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging a targeted survey of 2,070 island residents and distance to Turkey as an instrument, we find that direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies. Since refugees only passed through these islands, our findings challenge both standard economic and cultural explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment and show that mere exposure suffices in generating lasting increases in hostility.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Dominik Hangartner, Elias Dinas, Moritz Marbach, and Konstantinos Matakos, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How are immigrants and refugees in Sweden doing?
We use administrative Swedish data to show that, conditional on parent income, immigrant children have similar incomes and higher educational attainment in adulthood than native-born Swedes. This result, however, masks the fact that immigrant children born into poor families are more likely than similar natives to both reach the top of the income distribution and to stay at the bottom. Immigrant children from high-income families are also more likely than natives to regress to the economic bottom. Notably, however, children from predominantly-refugee sending countries like Bosnia, Syria, and Iran have higher intergenerational mobility than the average immigrant child in Sweden.
That paper, co-authored with Cristina Bratu, is from Valentin Bolotnyy, who is on the job market from Harvard. Here is my post on his job market paper.
Is Facebook causing anti-refugee attacks in Germany?
Here is the key result, as summarized by the NYT:
Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.
Here is the underlying Müller and Schwarz paper. They consider 3,335 attacks over a two-year period in Germany. But I say no, their conclusion has not been demonstrated. Where to start?
Here is one picture showing a key correlation:
That looks pretty strong, doesn’t it? Nein! That is not how propaganda works, as an extensive literature in sociology and political psychology will indicate. That is how it looks when you measure what is essentially the same variable — or its effects — two different ways. For instance, that very big spike in the middle of the distribution? As Ben Thompson has pointed out, it represents the New Year’s harassment attacks in Cologne. Maybe that caused both Facebook activity and other attacks to spike at the same time? Will you mock me if I resort to the “blog comment cliche” that correlation does not show causation?
To continue with the excellent Ben Thompson (he is worth paying for!), the identification method used in the paper is suspect, and he focuses on this quotation from the authors:
In our setting, the share of a municipality’s population that use the AfD Facebook page is an intuitive proxy for right-wing social media use; however, it is also correlated with differences in a host of observable municipality characteristics — most importantly the prevalence of right-wing ideology. We thus attempt to isolate the local component of social media usage that is uncorrelated with right-wing ideology by drawing on the number of users on the “Nutella Germany” page. With over 32 million likes, Nutella has one of the most popular Facebook pages in Germany and therefore provides a measure of general Facebook media use at the municipality level. While municipalities with high Nutella usage are more exposed to social media, they are not more likely to harbor right-wing attitudes.
The whole result rests on assumptions about Nutella? What if you used likes for Zwetschgenkuchen? Has a robustness test been done? Was a simple correlation not good or not illustrative enough? I’ll stick with the simple hypothesis that some municipalities have both more Facebook usage, due to high AfD membership, and also more attacks on refugees, and furthermore both of those variables rise in tense times. AfD is the German party with the strongest presence on Facebook, I am sorry to say.
You will note by the way that within Germany the Nutella page has only verifiable 21,915 individual interactions, including likes (32 million is the global number of Nutella likes…die Deutschen are not that nutty), and that is distributed across 4,466 municipal areas. (If you are confused, see p.12 in the paper, which I find difficult to follow and I suspect that represents the confusion of the authors.) That should make you more worried yet about the Nutella identification strategy. They never tell us what they would have without Nutella, a better tasting sandwich I would say.
I also would note the broader literature on propaganda once again. Consider the research of Markus Prior: “…evidence for a causal link between more partisan messages and changing attitudes or behaviors is mixed at best.” These Facebook results are simply far outside of what we normally suppose to be true about human responsiveness — so maybe the company is undercharging for its ads!
Ben adds:
I am bothered by the paper’s robustness section in two ways: first, every single robustness test confirmed the results. To me that does not suggest that the initial result must be correct; it suggests that the researchers didn’t push their data hard enough. There is always a test that fails, and that is a good thing: it shows the boundaries of what you have learned. Second, there were no robustness tests applied to one of the more compelling pieces of evidence, that Internet and Facebook outages were correlated with a reduction in violence against refugees. This is particularly unfortunate because in some ways this evidence works against the filter bubble narrative: after all, the idea is the filter bubbles change your reality over time, not that they suddenly inspire you to action out of the blue.
The authors do present natural experiments from Facebook and internet outages. They find that “…for a given level of anti-refugee sentiment, there are fewer attacks in municipalities with high Facebook usage during an internet outage than in municipalities with low Facebook usage without an outage.” (p.28). Again I find that confusing, but I note also that “internet outages themselves…do not have a consistent negative effect on the number of anti-refugee sentiments.” That is the simple story, and it appears to exonerate Facebook. pp.28-30 then present a number of interaction effects and variable multiplications, but I am not sure what to conclude from the whole mess. I’m still expecting internet outages to lower the number of attacks, but they don’t.
Even if internet or Facebook outages do have a predictive effect on attacks in some manner, it likely shows that Facebook is a communications medium used to organize gatherings and attacks (as the telephone once might have been), not, as the authors repeatedly suggest, that Facebook is somehow generating and whipping up and controlling racist sentiment over time. Again, compare such a possibility to the broader literature. There is good evidence that anti-semitic violence across German regions is fairly persistent, with pogroms during the Black Death predicting synagogue attacks during the Nazi time. And we are supposed to believe that racist feelings dwindle into passivity simply because the thugs cannot access Facebook for a few days or maybe a week? By the way, in their approach if there is an internet outrage, mobile devices do not in Germany pick up the slack.
I’d also like to revisit the NYT sentence, cited above, and repeated many times on Twitter:
Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.
That sounds horrible, but it is actually a claim about variation across municipalities, not a claim about the absolute importance of the internet. The authors also reported a very different and perhaps more relevant claim to the Times:
…this effect drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence.
I would have started the paper with that sentence, and then tried to estimate its robustness, without relying on Nutella.
As it stands right now, you shouldn’t be latching on to the reported results from this paper.
EU refugee markets in everything
European countries that refuse to share the burden of high immigration will face a financial charge of about €250,000 per refugee, according to Brussels’ plans to overhaul the bloc’s asylum rules.
The punitive financial pay-off clause is one of the most contentious parts of the European Commission’s proposed revision of the so-called Dublin asylum regulation, due to be revealed on Wednesday…
According to four people familiar with the proposal, this contribution was set at €250,000 per asylum seeker in Monday’s commission draft. But those involved in the talks say it may well be adjusted in deliberations over coming days.
“The size of the contribution may change but the idea is to make it appear like a sanction,” said one official who has seen the proposal. Another diplomat said in any event the price of refusing to host a refugee would be “hundreds of thousands of euros”.
Here is the full FT piece. Elsewhere on the pricing front, there is talk that at some point Uber will move away from surge pricing.
Another look at why the refugee deal does not involve incentive-compatible trades
Under the one in, one out policy, an undefined number of member-states have committed themselves to resettling 72,000 Syrian refugees from Turkey. But the EU’s record in resettling and relocating people is less than impressive: in September 2015, EU member-states agreed to relocate 160,000 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy (the so-called quota system). So far, they have relocated around 890. Some 600 cases are being held up because of security concerns, in part because of how difficult it is to perform background checks on asylum seekers. Even if the Turkish deal reduces the number of people making the perilous journey from Turkey to Greece, EU member-states would still need to resettle large numbers of Syrians. It is unclear why they would be more willing to do so now, when they have not fulfilled the promises they made six months ago.
That is from Camino Mortera-Martinez, the article has other points of interest.
Is the refugees deal time consistent?
Just to refresh your memory, part of the deal is that newly arriving refugees in Greece get sent to Turkey, but in return the EU takes a refugee currently in Turkey. The goal is to reduce the incentive to migrate as a refugee, since you end up in Turkey rather than in Europe.
Gideon Rachman writes:
First, will the Greek authorities have the administrative capacity to process and turn around refugees arriving on their islands — as well as the many thousands already stranded in Greece? Second, will Turkey really co-operate — particularly given the fact that the EU is unlikely to deliver on all its promises? (The pledge of visa-free travel for Turks is unpopular in many EU states.) Third, will migrants desperate to get to Europe find alternative routes — perhaps via Libya, which has no properly functioning government?
Kerem Oktem summarizes the deal and makes some excellent points, including this one:
…we know that desperate people cannot be stopped. They will simply resort to new routes that will be more dangerous, more lethal and more expensive, whether it is the land borders between Turkey and Bulgaria, the boat journey from Libya to Italy or a new trajectory through Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
I find it strange that these European governments find it repugnant to allow life-saving trade in human organs, or trading away some of one’s privacy, or for that matter a free labor market. Yet they don’t seem to mind an institutionalized system of trading one refugee for another, with the explicit goal of increasing the number of Syrians who are trapped.
In essence, the wealthier Europeans are arranging for Syria, Greece, and Turkey to pay for building a stronger wall.
The EU refugee Coasian bargain evolves
Turkey has made a host of last minute funding and political demands that threaten to derail a controversial EU-Turkey deal to dramatically reduce migrant flows to Europe.
Ahead of crunch summit between EU leaders and the Turkish prime minister on Monday, Ankara has called for an increase on the €3bn in aid previously promised by the EU, faster access to Schengen visas for Turkish citizens and accelerated progress in its EU membership bid, write Alex Barker and Duncan Robinson in Brussels.
Although talks remain fluid, the wishlist represents Turkey’s new price for giving the EU’s response to the migration crisis a harder edge by facilitating the systematic return of non-Syrian migrants from Greek islands to Turkey.
I don’t blame Turkey, but this is a good example of what happens when you rely on poorer, lower quality institution countries to solve your problems for you.
The story is here. By some accounts, the Turks will be getting much of their wish list. But here is Dani Rodrik’s comment — Schengen may collapse.
The plan, for the refugees that is
The Turks are already playing host to over 2m Syrian refugees – and many more could be on their way, if and when the fighting in Syria resumes in earnest. And yet the EU wants Turkey to close the safety valve that allows many Syrians to cross the sea to Greece and the EU. As one German official admitted to me in Berlin recently: “We’re asking Turkey to keep its border with Syria open to refugees, but to close its border to Greece and to accept non-Syrian migrants that we turn back from the EU. I’m not sure I would agree to that, if I were them.”
That is from an excellent blog post by Gideon Rachman. May I add something? I don’t see how that can work!
What about Coase? Gideon has thought that one though too, I wonder if he plays chess?:
In their efforts to persuade Turkey to accept at least parts of this deal, EU officials have dangled various sweeteners – including billions in aid and the prospect of easing the visa regime for Turks wishing to visit the EU. The Europeans also say that they might accept more refugees, direct from camps in Turkey – to reduce the incentives to cross the sea to Greece. But the Turks are understandably sceptical that any such promise would actually be kept.
A decisive, unified EU really is important for solving some problems, but that is exactly what we do not have…
Addendum: Here is more:
According to draft reform options seen by the Financial Times, responsibility for all asylum claims could be shifted [away from the “initial country status” standard] to the European Asylum Support Office.
This offers advice to national governments but would be turned into a federal agency responsible for claims. If Brussels pressed ahead with this option it would mark another transfer of sovereignty to the EU and ultimately require treaty change.
So the new plan is that every EU nation will approve this? And Plan B? Ronald Coase I love you, but I just don’t see how this is supposed to work…
The (refugee) problem with the Coase theorem
The EU’s agreed a €3bn deal with Turkey in order to help keep more migrants in the country, and reduce the influx of migrants. There’s been a lot of squabbling over how much each EU member state would pay, and the commitments have finally been agreed. The cash has not yet been delivered with concrete details yet to be ironed out. This has not been helped with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatening to send buses of migrants over the borders. The deal is sweetened for Turkey with a renewed commitment to talk about possible EU accession, and visa-liberalisation for Turkish citizens into the Schengen Area.
Perhaps the last part of that deal would not prove so popular with many EU citizens. Elsewhere:
…Tsipras has upped the ante again: warning parliament in Athens that he will not allow Greece to become, “a warehouse of souls,” and announcing that if Greece is left alone to deal with the crisis, he would block EU decisions at the next leaders’ summit in Brussels.
The Open Europe post is a good look at how Europe is failing to solve its refugee problems, or even come close.
America and the Refugees
My latest piece is on the Syrian refugees and I’m delighted that it’s in Playboy. Next step is to get invited to the Mansion. Here’s the opening:
Even 4-year-old Syrian orphans are too dangerous to welcome to the United States, says New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. What sort of man turns away desperate orphans out of fear? Christie’s words and actions are shameful and unbecoming of a great nation—as are those of 25 other governors who said they will work to keep Syrian refugees from moving to their state. Is America no longer the home of the brave?
Since 9/11 we have been told many times that our nation is at war. Our troops understand, and they have fought bravely whenever and wherever they have been called upon. Not once have they backed down or refused the call. Yet, when faced with the risk of orphan refugees, some of our leaders protest that the risk is too great. How can we ask so much of our troops but so little of ourselves?
Do read the whole thing. The link is surprisingly safe for work, at least when I clicked, but use at your own risk.
Syrian Refugees, Jelly Beans, and Murderers
A meme going around compares Syrian refugees to jelly beans:
If i gave you a bag of 50000 jellybeans and told you 100 are poisonous, you wouldnt accept them right? Then why would we accept 50000 refugees if some of them are bad?
I like jelly beans and numbers so I did a back of the envelope calculation. In the US there are about 15,000 murders per year. Most murderers kill only one person. Even serial killers kill only 2.8 people on average. Thus, 15,000 is also approximately the number of murderers in a year.
Let’s say that people live on average for 50 years–that’s a bit low but our figure for the number of murderers was a bit high–this means that in the current population there will be approximately 15000*50=750,000 murderers.
750,000 killers among us struck me as an awful lot when I first calculated the number but there are approximately 166,700 people in prison for murder right now and of the 750,000 some of them are not yet murderers and some of them won’t be caught. Thus, on reflection, 750,000 seems like a scary, yet reasonable estimate.
The current US population is 322 million so there are .0023 murderers per capita or 2.33 murderers per 1000 or 116 murderers per 50,000 people in the United States. Put differently, about 116 American babies out of every 50,000 will grow up to murder someone. (Perhaps the NYMag should rerun its poll?). In contrast, only 100 of the 50000 jelly beans were poisonous.
Thus, if anything, Syrian jelly beans look pretty good compared to American jelly beans.
Addendum: See Alex Nowrasteh for calculations going beyond jelly beans.
Refugee markets in everything
The annual report in 2013 from a multibillion-dollar London private-equity firm that counts a French pastry baker and a Dutch shoemaker among its holdings touted a new opportunity with “promising organic and acquisitive growth potential.”
That investment was the management of refugee camps.
“The margins are very low,” said Willy Koch, the retired founder of the Swiss company, ORS Service AG, which runs a camp in Austria that overflowed this summer with migrants who crossed from the Balkans and Hungary. “One of the keys is, certainly, volume.”
The WSJ story is here, or maybe here. And here is a related business:
In Sweden, the government paid a language-analysis firm $900,000 last year to verify asylum-seekers’ claims of where they were from.
Look for more stories along these lines. Hat tip goes to Hugo Lindgren.
Who should take in more Syrian refugees?
Of course the United States should take in more Syrians, but we are not the only laggard:
Of the 4 million Syrians who have fled their country since the war began, including hundreds of thousands who have poured into Europe, the number who have been resettled in Britain could fit on a single London Underground train — with plenty of seats to spare.
Just 216 Syrian refugees have qualified for the government’s official relocation program, according to data released last week.
By the way, not long ago there were over 1.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria (pdf), I wonder how they figure in all the recent numbers we are seeing.
Before the 1920s, large numbers of Syrians (Syrian-Lebanese) emigrated to Brazil, most of all to Sao Paulo, with a second and smaller wave coming in the 1950s. As of March:
Since 2013 when Brazil opened its doors, 1,740 Syrian refugees have been registered in the country – far more than in the US.
But still that is not many compared to the preexisting total. According to the above link, Brazil has about 15 million Arabs and about three million people of Syrian descent, and by virtually all accounts this connection has benefited the rest of Brazil too, not just the migrants.
Here is my earlier post Will Latin America Stay Underpopulated for Another Century? And can you guess where that top photo is from?
How to think about refugee policy
Dave Bieler, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I see that you've provided some commentary on Marginal Revolution about refugee situations, but I'm curious to know what you think about refugee policies – i.e. what is the role of government? What is the role of private insitutions? How can different types of institutions and organizations improve or make worse various situations? Do you have any thoughts or links to articles or books? I think it would make for an interesting blog post!
This question may be more relevant soon, although Muslim refugees from the Middle East do not have the best chances of getting into America. I have read that one small town in Sweden has taken in more Iraqi refugees than has the entire United States. Here is Wikipedia on refugees. I hold a few views:
1. Refugees are deserving of migration toleration when possible, but they are not more deserving than equally destitute non-refugees.
2. Refugees nonetheless capture the imagination of the public to some extent, albeit for a very limited period of time. Their beleaguered status provides a useful means of framing, to boost migration for humanitarian reasons. When it comes to private institutions, refugee issues may be a useful way of raising funds, again for humanitarian aid, although again refugees should not be privileged per se, relative to other needy victims.
3. Legal treatment of refugees is inevitably arbitrary and unfair. There is not and will not be a clear set of rational standards for who gets in and who doesn't. There are better and worse standards at the extreme points, but don't expect this to ever get rigorous, not even at the level of ideal theory.
4. There always exists some pool of refugees who will help the migration-accepting country, even if you do not believe that about all pools of refugees. Let's take in some Egyptian Copts, who possibly are in danger now. Some groups of African migrants have done quite well in the United States and we can take in more oppressed women from north Africa. In other words, "immigration skepticism" may redirect the direction of refugee acceptance, but it need not discriminate against the idea of taking in refugees.
5. Optimal refugee policy is most of all an exercise in public relations, as ruled by the idea of the optimal extraction of sympathy. Explicit sympathy from the public cannot be expected to last very long. In the best case scenario, sympathy for the refugees is replaced by fruitful indifference, so as to avoid "refugee fatigue."
See my earlier remarks on sovereignty. Here is an argument against admitting refugees; I don't agree with it.
Thai-Cambodia refugee camps, 1975-1999
Study this model and try to improve on it. Here is further historical information.
What does the domestic U.S. political equilibrium look like when we are funding and running these camps? Will Obama be seen as "doing too much" for "black people"? How will we punish wrongdoers in the camps? Will the residents be treated better than those in Guantanamo? What happens when we, explicitly or implicitly, start using Haitian gangs to keep order in the camps? How many Haitians will the DR shoot crossing the border?
Haitians are extremely nationalistic, sensitive to foreign influence, and they have a clear historical memory of the U.S. occupation of 1915-1934. What if they ask us to leave before the camps are self-sustaining? For how long will we pretend that Haiti still has a real government?
Those are my questions for today.