Abstract

Does exposure to immigrants at the local level affect how attitudes of natives towards immigration evolve over time?  We analyze the change in anti-immigration attitudes using data on two popular initiatives in Switzerland which proposed to restrict immigration and took place in 2000 and 2014. Our findings are in line with the inter-group contact hypothesis, namely that the presence of immigrants at the municipality level reduces anti-immigration attitudes over time. More specifically, in a municipality with an average share of immigrants of 19%, the support for restricting immigration policies decreases by 3.8 percentage points between 2000 and 2014. Moreover, we find that exposure to immigrants who are linguistically different from natives makes the latter more favorable to immigration. However, we show that the contact hypothesis is modulated by potential economic threats: the positive effect of exposure to immigrants is attenuated if unemployment rate or housing prices are rising.