Closed borders, closed minds? COVID-related border closures, EU support and hostility towards immigrants

Abstract

Do border closures affect political attitudes? While a large body of research has discussed the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on nationalism and outgroup hostility, much less is known about how one of the main policy responses to stop the virus, closing the national borders, has impacted political attitudes. We argue that the sudden and unprecedented closures of national borders in the COVID-19 crisis decreased EU support and increased hostility towards immigrants. These closures signalled that people from across the border are a threat to public health and showed little trust in European governance. We have collected fine-grained regional data on COVID-19-related border closures in Germany that we matched with survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We rely on a difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of closed borders on European identity and outgroup hostility. While we find that border closures decrease EU support and increase hostility towards immigrants, these effects fade away relatively quickly. Hence, our study suggests that border closures have only limited impact on political attitudes. Our findings have important implications for the growing literature on border politics in the EU and elsewhere.