Abstract

Immigration is often considered as an important cause of populism, but the reverse causality between immigration and populism has received much less attention. In this paper, I use data on populist leaders and bilateral migration flows since 1960 to explore the effect of populism on immigration. Using several variants of the synthetic control method, I find that having a populist leader significantly decreases the growth rate of immigration, in particular for low-skilled immigration. I then use the DEMIG policy dataset to explore the mechanisms behind those results. I find that populist leaders implement a much higher number of restrictive immigration policies than other leaders and that these policies often target low-skilled migrants. This implies that the decrease in high-skilled immigration flows is due to a lower attractiveness because of the populist leader.