Beyond emergency responses: Why local context matters for refugee allocation

A growing body of evidence shows that rising inflows of immigrants and refugees can trigger political backlash. This column examines how local economic and cultural factors shaped responses to refugee inflows in Italy during the 2014–2017 crisis. Backlash was stronger in wealthier areas and in communities with denser within-group ties. Refugee resettlement in more culturally integrated areas significantly lowered support for anti-immigration parties. Refugee reception policies must move beyond numerical fairness and consider the socio-cultural characteristics of host communities.

Europe is once again debating how to share responsibility for asylum seekers. As the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum moves from legislation to implementation, new solidarity mechanisms aim to support countries under pressure and make burden-sharing more credible. However, the core challenge goes beyond simply deciding how many refugees each country should host; it involves designing relocation and reception policies that do not unintentionally fuel political backlash, thereby undermining integration and the long-term sustainability of asylum policy.

This concern is far from abstract. A growing body of empirical evidence shows that rising inflows of immigrants and refugees can shift voting toward anti-immigration and far-right parties, although the magnitude of these effects varies significantly across receiving communities (e.g. Bloom et al. 2015, Wagner and Halla 2015, Hangartner et al. 2019, Dustmann et al. 2017).

Do local conditions trigger political backlash? And how can resettlement policies account for local heterogeneity to curb support for anti-immigration parties? In a recent paper (Campo et al. 2025), we address these questions by disentangling political effects driven by local economic factors from those operating through socio-cultural channels. Leveraging novel measures of social capital and intergroup interactions, we show that local contexts shape political responses to refugee resettlement in systematically different ways, with important implications for the design of geographically targeted resettlement policies.

Refugee reception as a structural challenge

Italy provides a particularly informative setting to study the questions above. During the 2014–2017 European refugee crisis, the country received on average around 150,000 migrants and asylum seekers per year, becoming one of the main entry points into Europe. The rapid and largely unexpected surge in arrivals led authorities to rely predominantly on extraordinary reception centres, originally conceived as temporary facilities to manage inflows quickly. As a result, arriving refugees were dispersed across the territory, while relatively limited resources were devoted to the social and institutional investments required for long-term integration (Campo et al. 2024).

Political backlash depends on local conditions

Using the quasi-random allocation of asylum seekers across Italian municipalities during the refugee crisis, we examine how local conditions at the time of settlement shaped political responses in receiving areas. We estimate the causal effects of local economic and socio-cultural characteristics, isolating the role of in-group and out-group dynamics in driving support for anti-immigration parties.

Figure 1 summarises the evidence. Two results stand out. First, ceteris paribus, backlash is stronger in more affluent places: higher income per capita is associated with larger political responses to refugee exposure. This challenges the view that opposition is concentrated in economically left-behind areas and points instead to perceived cultural or identity-based threats.

Figure 1 Political backlash by local characteristics

Notes: This figure shows the estimated effect on vote share for anti-immigration parties of refugee exposure, interacted with local economic characteristics, social capital, and intergroup contact measures at baseline.

Second, the type of social capital matters more than its overall level. Municipalities with stronger bonding social capital (i.e. connections formed within groups or communities) exhibit greater backlash, suggesting that dense within-group ties amplify ethno-cultural conflict (Putnam et al. 2000, Portes 2000). By contrast, backlash is weaker in municipalities with stronger bridging social capital (measured through mixed marriages, lower residential segregation, and the presence of foreign-born local politicians). Communities with successful experiences of multicultural integration and cross-group interaction are more resilient to refugee inflows (Allport 1954, Mousa 2020).

Why allocation rules matter for political backlash

These findings call into question the effectiveness of resettlement policies that rely exclusively on population-based allocation rules while largely neglecting host communities’ characteristics. Allocating refugees without regard to local socio-cultural context may ultimately carry political and integration costs. When refugees are systematically assigned to municipalities where backlash is more likely, reception policies may strengthen anti-immigration parties, undermine local cooperation, and weaken support for integration.

To make this trade-off explicit, we simulate counterfactual allocation policies that redistribute asylum seekers not only by population size, but also by local characteristics associated with lower political backlash.

Figure 2 compares reductions in political backlash under alternative counterfactual allocation rules, subject to varying capacity constraints. Backlash falls by between 34% and 90%, depending on the constraints imposed by local reception capacity. Policies that shift refugees toward more culturally integrated contexts yield the largest reductions in support for anti-immigration parties.

Figure 2 Change in backlash and refugee dispersion under optimal assignments

Notes: This figure shows the change in anti-immigration backlash and the change in refugee dispersion across Italian municipalities computed under the optimal assignment policies (for diverse capacity constraints) with respect to the actual dispersal policy in place. The red dashed line reports the average dispersion rate under the random dispersal policy.

Crucially, these gains do not necessarily require extreme concentration in a few cities. While full concentration would be unrealistic and potentially harmful, our results show that even policies preserving broad dispersal can substantially reduce backlash by reallocating refugees toward more socially and culturally integrated municipalities. By contrast, policies based only on demographic and economic criteria are far less effective, highlighting the central role of local socio-cultural conditions in shaping political responses to refugee reception.

Conclusions

Refugee reception in Europe is too often treated as a temporary emergency or reduced to a problem of numerical fairness. Evidence from Italy’s experience during the refugee crisis suggests a different perspective: political backlash is neither inevitable nor uniform, but depends systematically on local social and cultural conditions. Moving beyond an emergency-based approach therefore requires reception policies that account for heterogeneity across locations and incorporate the socio-cultural characteristics of host communities, as economic and demographic criteria alone are insufficient to prevent local discontent.

Source : VOXeu