LN 2

Can Terrorism Abroad Influence Migration Attitudes at Home?

Author:
Olivier Trabelsi – 19-946-557
January 2020
D-GESS
Theoretical argument
With terrorism and migration being two main security concerns, a like between the two is quickly made
by the people. Even if in most cases, attacks in Europe have been carried by native-born residents,
opinion polls show that the public often associates migration and terrorism. While a lot of studies exist
about this topic, they mainly cover the biggest terror attacks and neglect the spatial dimension of the
question. Despite most of the attacks being of a smaller scale and with less media coverage, they can
still exert important influences on public sentiment. This question is highly relevant because there is a
proven correlation between public opinion and policy outputs (Boswell et al. 2019), coming from the
fact that politicians are often office-seeking and tend to go in the way that goes with the public opinion.
It is therefore important to comprehend these mechanisms to predict the policy outputs.

The hypothesis of the authors is that: “Terrorist attacks propagate

Salience
migration concern across borders with larger effects in neighbouring
than more distant countries.” To comprehend this article, it is important
to first understand the two dimensions of attitude toward migration.
The first one is the preference and relates to the level of immigration
Preference
that the individual would like to see. The second is salience and
represents the intensity of that feeling. From a political point of view, an Figure 1: The two dimensions
of the opinion on immigration
opinion with a low salience is unlikely to become a political priority
whereas, on the contrary, a problem with a high salience is very likely to trigger a strong response.

To gather Data on the view of the population on immigration, the authors used the data from the
Eurobarometer.

Figure 2: Salliance of migration for diverse countries in Europa (Bohmelt, Bove and Nussio, 2019)
They then created a spatial model by using data on foreign states level of terrorism after the 9/11
events. They argue that terrorism events have a stronger impact on neighbouring countries because
of the following points:

People from neighbouring countries are often connected by frequent exchange, travel, a shared
culture and are therefore part of the same identity group. Because those groups are not spatially
limited by national borders, an attack on the people of the same group will lead to a higher salience of
migration-threat because the sentiment of imminent danger is bigger when “the same people” as us
are attacked.

Furthermore, the news media are more likely to show a higher coverage for terrorist events that
happened geographically close. Two examples of this phenomenon are the “Je suis Charly” and “Je suis
Paris” slogan who were widely adopted in Europa as a sign of solidarity after the terror attack in Paris
in 2015. While terror attacks frequently happen in other parts of the world, they don’t create the same
reaction as those happening in Europa because they mainly concern another identity group and are
less intensively covered by news media. It is noteworthy to mention that while the total immigration
population of a state doesn’t increase terror-related incidents, ties with migrants from terror-prone
countries can still be exploited by terrorists. (Bove and Böhmelt 2016).

The create their model, the authors approximated the following equation:
i = analysed country
j = origin country of
Dependent variable One-year lagged value
the stimulus

𝒀𝒊𝒕 = ∝ + 𝝓𝒀𝒊𝒕−𝟏 + 𝝆 ∑ 𝒘𝒊𝒋𝒕 𝒙𝒋𝒕 + 𝜷𝑿𝒊𝒕 + 𝜺𝒊𝒕

𝒋
Shock at time t
constant
Product of connectivity matrix and
explanatory variable = WxTerrorism
Figure 3: Spatial model on the diffusion of migration concern
Terrorism

This model allows to calculate how the terrorism in a country will affect the salience of migration in
the neighbouring countries. This model uses a connectivity matrix and some explanatory variables. To
make sure that exposition to the same exogenous factor is not the cause of a shared view on migration,
the researcher uses a lagged dependent variable and take in consideration various country and time
fixed effects. The weighting matrix uses direct contiguity between the countries: shared border or
coast separated by up do 400 miles of water give a value of 1 in the matrix. While the binary weighting
system simplify the analyse, they developed another model considering the distance between the
capitals of the countries in the goal to not only have a binary weighting. To conduct robustness checks,
they created other models taking into account variables like the lethality of attack, the electoral
success of anti-migration parties, the cultural similarity of contiguous countries, etc. Based on those
calculations, the researchers conclude that the views on migration are effectively affected by the
terrorism abroad at the condition that terror acts are not a repeated occurrence and something
common (for example, a terrorist act in Iraq won’t be treated as something extraordinary as a terrorist
act in France) and that the distance effectively reduces this influence.

Theoretical Contribution
We can find a lot of literature exploring the various interactions between terrorism and migration: for
example, some are studying the link between the sophistication and the fear caused by an attack
(Avdan and Webb 2018). Another author is analysing the various legislative responses against
terrorism in Europe (Epifanio 2011). While other studies already went in the direction taken by the
authors of this article by affirming that an attack taking place in a country or directly affecting the
citizens of this country have a bigger impact than attacks carried in another place of the world
(Avdan 2014), this paper from Bohmelt, Bove and Nussio (2019) allows us to make a step forward
about the comprehension of the diffusion process of views on migration after a terrorist event thanks
to the mathematical model and extensive sets of controls. It is now possible to approximate how the
salience of migration propagate between countries and how the spatial dimension affects this diffusion
process. Another paper publicised by two of the same authors take an alternative approach and argues
that rather than the distance, the local migration context (homogeneity, experience with migration,
etc.) is more likely to impact the migration attitudes (Nussio, Bove, and Steele 2019). We can find other
articles arguing that some case of terror attacks, for example the 2015 terror attack in France, didn’t
change the views on migration on the targeted country (Castanho Silva 2018). Another article argues
that those terror attacks rather changed the view on security (Brouard, Vasilopoulos, and
Foucault 2018). The authors of our article are arguing against this opinion by saying that these studies
only concentrate on one sensational event and don’t analyse all the terror-related attacks in Europe.

To conclude, we can say that this article brings a good way to estimate the mechanism between
terrorism and the diffusion of migration attitude, but it is necessary to take these findings with caution.
While mathematics models can give a very good estimation, they cannot consider all the variables of
such a complex question and some case study can be necessary to fully embrace the question.
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