Christian De Kraker (p)

Kristinn Hermannsson

See extended abstract

Daria Denti (p), Alessandra Faggian

Christian De Kraker

Mapping the Italian geography of hate.
Daria Denti and Alessandra Faggian
Gran Sasso Science Institute

Abstract. Where do hatred manifestations happen? This paper investigates the relationship between hate manifestations and socio-economic, cultural, institutional and geographic characteristics of the 611 Italian Local Labor Market Areas. This issue appears relevant from many perspectives, starting from the fact that hate manifestations have been experiencing a fast growth in past years. Indeed, despite growing general concern on the hatred phenomenon, fewer efforts have thus far been devoted to investigating the relationship between hate manifestations and situational features of places. This paper addresses this issue by building a novel and unique database collecting geo-referenced hate manifestations with respect to the Italian context. Through empirical estimation of a hurdle model with regional fixed effect, we first assess which conditions predict the occurrence of a hate manifestation and then which features influence their expected frequency. We find that the set of situational factors identified as meaningful predictor for the expected frequency of hate events is smaller and partly different from the set of factors that significantly influences the occurrence of hate: once the “hurdle” of experiencing at least one hate manifestation is crossed, fewer conditions are needed to fuel further hate events happening in the same place. The allocation of refugees’ hosting structures is a robust predictor of both the occurrence of hate events and of the expected frequency of hate manifestations, whereas foreign resident population does not display any significant empirical association with hatred. Besides migration-related features, expected occurrence of hatred is positively associated to social stress, self-interest by affluent people, community size and populist parties but negatively associated to the level of trust and to ease of interaction. Expected frequency of hate events is positively predicted by community size, the presence of a geographical hub, moderate and populist parties, whereas ease of interaction is associated with reduction in the expected frequency of hate events. Our results appear consistent with established socio-economic literature on hatred and can be also related both to recent works on populism and to the increasing literature analyzing the relationship between voting behavior and migrants.
Keywords: refugees, migrants, hate, political economy, Local Labor Market Area

Kristinn Hermannsson (p)

Daria Denti

The ongoing conflict in Syria has resulted in a large wave of refugees with the UN Refugee Agency estimating that over 5 million people have left the country since 2011. From the point of view of European policy makers this raises the question of who these people are, where they are heading and whether they will return once the conflict is over? To shed some light on these questions I present results from a new ESRC-GCRF funded survey, carried out among young refugees in the UK, Greece and Lebanon in 2017. The pattern of migration is consistent with the view in the migration literature that human capital is positively correlated with distance of migration. Looking at qualifications and self-reported skills, there is a clear sorting on observed ability, with the most qualified refugees being in the UK and least so in Lebanon. The converse is observed for stated re-migration intentions, with refugees in Lebanon most intent on returning to Syria and those in the UK least intent on doing so, whilst the refugee population in Greece aspires to re-settle in another European country.

From the point of view of European policy discourse these results indicate that it is unrealistic to assume Syrian refugees will be temporary visitors in Europe and policies should aim for their long-term integration. Moreover the data show that refugees have a range of qualifications and experiences, as well as a range of labour market and settlement aspirations. A key priority should be identifying the best fit between refugee capabilities and aspirations on the one hand and the needs and capacity of host regions on the other.