Germany’s Changing ‘Boundary of Belonging’: Anti-Immigrant Attitudes amidst the Refugee Crisis 2015

In 2015 and 2016, more than a million refugees arrived in Germany. How did this ’Refugee Crisis’ impact
native Germans’ understanding of who belongs to the German community and who does not? My thesis
initially establishes that attitudes towards all immigrant groups except refugees improved during the Refugee
Crisis. Why might this be the case? I investigate two potential causal pathways: First, I examine the
impact of county-level exposure to refugees on attitudes towards incumbent immigrant groups using a crosssectional
and a differences-in-differences design. While the cross-sectional analysis indicates that increased
refugee presence on the county-level leads to improved attitudes towards other outgroups, the differences-indifferences
design yields no conclusive findings. Second, I examine whether the national news media coverage
drives the attitudinal shift, by analyzing the salience and sentiment of coverage on various immigrant groups.
I show that the salience of refugees increased during the crisis while the salience of some incumbent groups
decreased. The sentiment analysis yields no significant results with regards to incumbent immigrant groups.
Together these findings suggests that Germany’s “boundary of belonging” shifted to become more inclusive
of non-refugee immigrants as a result of the 2015/2016 refugee inflow. These findings present an important
case study of how a homogenous society’s definitions of inclusion and exclusion adjust in the face of increased
immigration.