The Immigrant Next Door∗

Abstract

We study how the presence of individuals of a given foreign descent shapes natives’ attitudes and behavior toward that group. Using individualized donations data from large charitable organizations, we show that the long-term presence of a given foreign ancestry in a US county leads to more generous behavior specifically toward that group’s ancestral country. To shed light on mechanisms, we focus on attitudes and behavior toward Arab-Muslims, combining several existing large-scale surveys, cross-county data on implicit prejudice, and a newly-collected national survey. We show that greater Arab-Muslim populations: (i) decrease both natives’ explicit and implicit prejudice against Arab-Muslims, (ii) reduce natives’ support for policies and political candidates hostile toward Arab-Muslims, (iii) lead to more personal contact between natives and Arab-Muslim individuals, and (iv) increase natives’ knowledge of Arab-Muslims and Islam in general. JEL Classification: D83, D91, P16, J15