This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. We exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after WWII. These migrants were poorer than the local population but had full voting rights and were eligible for social welfare. We show that...

A commonly expressed concern about immigration is that it undermines social cohesion in the receiving country. In this paper, we study the impact of a large and sudden inflow of asylum seekers on several indicators of social cohesion. In 2015/16, over one million asylum seekers from Syria,...