The Immigrant Next Door: Long-Term Contact, Generosity, and Prejudice

Leonardo Bursztyn (1, 2) , Thomas Chaney (3) , Tarek Alexander (4, 2) , Hassan Aakaash Rao (5)

1 University of Chicago
2 NBER - National Bureau of Economic Research [New York]
3 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)
4 BU - Boston University [Boston]
5 Harvard University [Cambridge]

We study how decades-long exposure to individuals of a given foreign descent shapes natives' attitudes and behavior toward that group. Using individualized donations data from large charitable organizations, we show that long-term exposure to a given foreign ancestry leads to more generous behavior specifically toward that group's ancestral country. To shed light on mechanisms, we focus on attitudes and behavior toward Arab Muslims, combining several existing large-scale surveys, cross-county data on implicit prejudice, and a newly-collected national survey. We show that greater long-term exposure: (i) decreases both explicit and implicit prejudice against Arab-Muslims, (ii) reduces support for policies and political candidates hostile toward Arab-Muslims, (iii) leads to more personal contact with Arab-Muslim individuals, and (iv) increases knowledge of Arab-Muslims and Islam in general.

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance

Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Chaney, Tarek Alexander, Hassan Aakaash Rao. The Immigrant Next Door: Long-Term Contact, Generosity, and Prejudice. 2022. ⟨hal-03870145⟩