Immigration makes people more tolerant

Immigration and Nationalism: The Importance of Identity
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Previous studies identified the increased number of immigrants as one of the determinantsbehind the electoral success of nationalist, anti-immigration parties in Italy, Denmark, Austria and France. However, the increase in the number of immigrants is often associated with a changed composition of the stock of immigrants by nationalities and, therefore, by a different cultural identity of the immigrants.  In this work I show that this change in the identity of the migrants and, in particular, their increased cultural and genetic distance from the natives, is indeed positively associated with nationalist vote in Italy. The result is stronger for
linguistic distance and for genetic distance, but weaker for religious distance. I also showed that immigrants fractionalization is positively associated with nationalist vote.

The other closest work in the literature is Brunner and Kuhn (2018). They exploit the nature of the direct democratic system in Switzerland, where citizens have been recently called to vote in many occasions about specific immigration policies, to study the effect of immigration on anti-immigration votes. . . They find a positive relationship between the share of culturally distant immigrants and anti-immigration votes

Similar results to Barone et al. (2016), with a similar identification, appear in Halla, Wagner and Zweimller (2013) for Austria. They find that the increased inflow of immigrants is positively associated with voting for the Freedom Party of Austria, whose policy platform is heavily based on an anti-immigration agenda. As for the channel, they identify the deterioration in the quality of the public schools in the cities with bigger immigrants’ shares. Otto and Steinhardt (2014) also find a positive relationship between immigration and xenophobic vote exploiting variability at the district level within the city of Hamburg. They also find a significant decrease in the vote share for the political parties that explicitly campaigned in favor of more liberal immigration policies. Gerdes and Wadensjo (2008), Harmon (2017) and Dustman, Vassiljeva and Piil(2016) found similar results for Denmark.

The last two works, propose different identifications, exploiting, respectively, the availability of houses for rental (since Danish does not allow immigrants to buy houses) and a quasi-random assignment of refugees across Danish municipalities. Similarly, Edo et al. (2018) found a positive relationship between immigration and far-right vote in French presidential elections, using again historical settlement patterns of immigrants to instrument their current location choices. They also find that this result is driven by low educated, non-European immigrants, therefore pointing to labor market competition and cultural diversity as potential channels.

Mendez and Cutillas (2014) find instead no effect of immigration on the Spanish election results in the period 1996-2011. However, when they split the sample according to the nationality of the migrants, separately considering the share of immigrants and the shares of African immigrants, they find a positive effect of African immigrants on votes for anti-immigration parties. One way to interpret this evidence is that culturally distant migrants, along linguistic and religious traits, foster an anti-immigration sentiment more than culturally similar ones. I find similar results for Italy, but I propose a more systematic treatment of cultural diversity.

Several studies based on survey data also find a significant empirical relationship between immigration and an anti-immigration sentiment. In particular, Dustman and Preston (2001)find that, in England, a higher concentration of minorities leads to a more negative attitude towards them. In two related contributions Mayda (2006) and Facchini and Mayda (2009) find that skilled individuals are more likely to be pro-immigration, especially in richer countries that experienced an inflow of unskilled individuals. Card et al. (2012) find that the attitudes toward immigration are influenced both by concerns over labor market outcomes and over compositional amenities such as their neighborhood characteristics.  Along the same lines, Kaufmann (2017), finds that changes in the immigrants share are associated with an anti-
immigration sentiment.
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp511.pdf