Dismantling the 'Jungle': Migrant Relocation and Extreme Voting in France

Abstract

Large migrant inflows have spurred anti-immigrant sentiment, but can small inflows have a different impact? We exploit the redistribution of migrants after the dismantling of the 'Calais Jungle' in France to study the impact of the exposure to few migrants, which we estimate using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables. We find that in the presence of a migrant center (CAO), the growth rate of vote shares for the main far-right party (Front National (FN), our proxy for anti-immigrant sentiment) between 2012 and 2017 is reduced by about 12 percentage points. This effect, which crucially depends on the inflow's size, points towards the contact hypothesis (Allport 1954).