Chapter 1: Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 01.Introduction Europe has changed its face in the last 60 years. It has changed because of the unprecedented prosperity that the post-war period brought, because of the process of European integration, which accelerated after the end of the Cold War, and because of demographic changes. Demographic change has happened rapidly in Europe, bringing two related trends. On one side, European native population is getting older (and it has for some time), with fertility rates at the bottom of international rankings. On the other hand, development, stability and prosperity have made Europe an attractive destination for international migrants. European countries have transitioned from sending places of migrants to receiving places. Even though European integration, with the creation of European Citizenship law, permits European citizens full mobility within the Union, intra-European mobility was extremely low from the late sixties until the two most recent round of enlargement in 2004 and 2007 (Recchi et al. 2003). From the 1990s, however, Western European countries started receiving a steady flow of extra-European migrants. Those migration flows were encouraged by labor demand, coming from receiving countries’ changed demographic landscape, and by permissive asylum laws, which were later changed but letChapter 1: Introduction 2 many migrants in. For the first time after WWII, European countries found themselves with the necessity to absorb and assimilate a relatively large population of foreigners. Economists and social science researchers have long argued that immigration is a necessity for European countries, given their aging population and still low fertility rates (Messina 2007). If European countries want to maintain their comprehensive welfare state and generous retirement benefits, economists argue, they have to allow migrants in to replenish the ranks of taxpayers (see, for instance, Borjas 1995). Without younger citizens to pay for the retirees, welfare state in many European countries is bound to go bankrupt. The economic rationale for allowing migration is clear, especially in the absence of the political will to change the above-mentioned welfare benefits. European voters, however, are not sold on the idea of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Europe though. They have expressed their discontent with increased migration flows by rewarding parties that have campaigned explicitly in favor of stopping (or at least dramatically decreasing) such migratory flows. Most of those parties occupy (according to social scientists) the far right of the political spectrum. This research investigates how European citizens are supporting parties that make migration one of their main battle horses (if not, sometimes, the most prominent one). I will show that more migrants actually mean better performances for such parties. I will also show that anti-migrant parties are able to capture anti-migrant vote even when other parties share very similar platformChapter 1: Introduction 3 and policies, as it happened to the Northern League (NL) in Italy and the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) in Austria. I will show that not all migrants are the same when it comes to prompting such political reaction, and I will show that there are enormous variations of that phenomenon from city to city and region to region, not only across nations in Europe. The main geographic level of analysis of this research will be the municipality. Why the municipal level? This choice comes from a vacuum in the social science literature and from empirical observation. There is no shortage of comparative analysis of political reaction to migration in the European setting, with a special focus on anti-migrant parties (Betz 1991, 2001; Boeri and Brücker 2005; Citrin & Sides 2007; Cole 2005; de Lange 2007; Fennema 1997, 2004; Goodwin 2006; Hainmueller & Hiscox 2007; Ignazi 2005; Geddes 2003; Kessler & Freeman 2005a, 2005b; Kitschelt 2007; Knigge 1998; Lahav 2004; Lubbers et al. 2002; Malchow-Møller et al. 2009; Masso 2009; Mayda 2006; Mudde 1996, 1999; O’Rourke & Sinnott 2006; Petttigrew et al. 2007; Rydgren 2008; van der Brug et al. 2007). We have solid recounts of the differences amongst European countries, differences deriving from institutional, economic and social variables. Still, as citizens, we perceive change first in our own community. We work and live in neighborhoods and cities. That is where we see changes in the composition of the population (new, different, faces), changes in safety (more crime, or at least the perception of it), changes in the look of our cities. In cities, we can really see whether we like what is changing or not. Since natives feel the effect of immigration especially at the city level, it isChapter 1: Introduction 4 essential to show the variation in political reaction to migrants across cities. This is a first step in trying to explain what makes some communities less or more likely to react against migrants, what makes some groups of migrants less or more likely to provoke negative reaction, and how to address such issues at the local level. Previous research has simply buried the local level in a Bell curve that hid the profound differences that exist from city to city. My research moves the local level to front stage for a fresh look at the environment where natives interact with migrants the most. This research will investigate the issue of political reaction to migration at the municipal level in three countries: Italy, Austria and the UK. We still keep countries as a reference because we are dealing with voting, and elections are still largely a national issue, even in the setting of the European Union. Institutional constraints are different from country to country, and so this research has to take those into consideration. The next part of the introduction will lay out my case for the use of municipalities as the level of analysis. The rest of the first chapter will a) review the social sciences literature on migration in Europe and political reaction to it; b) formally state the hypotheses of this research; c) lay out my research design and explain my choice of cases; d) finally, illustrate the whole research plan. 01.1 Local Environment and ContextChapter 1: Introduction 5 Since my research focuses on the political reaction to immigration at the local level, I need to address the reason why I chose this