The politics of asylum: Local exposure reshapes UK voting

The UK has seen a sharp rise in asylum applications since the Covid-19 pandemic, reaching about 100,000 annually in 2023–25, compared with 30,000–40,000 in the previous two decades. Around half of applicants now enter irregularly, mostly via ‘small boats’ crossing the English Channel. These arrivals have gained substantial salience within an emboldened anti-immigration movement, culminating in one of the largest xenophobic demonstrations in recent UK history. This column assesses whether exposure to asylum seekers affects voting behavior, building on a literature with mixed results across countries.

We compare two groups within the same national framework: dispersed asylum seekers, who are allocated housing but cannot choose their destination, and non-dispersed claimants, who can opt for residence. This enables a causal analysis that separates visibility and dispersion from broad immigration attitudes.

Politics and the dispersal policy in the UK

The dispersal policy assigns asylum accommodation nationwide; those with resources may opt out, though fewer than 20% did so during the study period. Dispersed asylum seekers cluster in a limited set of Local Authorities, while non-dispersed claimants are more widely distributed, often in wealthier southern England. This pattern creates two quasi-experimental groups for examining electoral consequences within the same political system.

Identifying causal effects: Beyond the dispersal policy

Simple fixed effects cannot establish causality due to endogeneity concerns: local trends may influence both asylum placement and voting, and asylum seekers might avoid hostile areas. We develop an instrumental variable strategy: for dispersed asylum seekers, the instrument uses the pre-existing stock of low-quality public housing (commonly used to host asylum seekers) interacted with national inflows of asylum claims to forecast dispersion, an approach orthogonal to baseline electoral performance. For non-dispersed asylum seekers, we rely on a shift–share instrument based on historical settlement patterns of migrants from the same origin countries (Card 2001).

British voters shifting to the right

Empirical results show that increases in dispersed asylum seekers lead to a sizeable rightward shift in local election outcomes: a one standard deviation rise widens the Conservative–Labour vote-share gap by 3.1 percentage points in favour of the Conservatives.Party-specific effects indicate Labour losses and Conservative gains, with some gains for the Green Party and UKIP, though not enough to translate into more council seats due to the majoritarian system. No turnout change is detected. The effect strengthens after 2010, aligning with Conservative governance, and extends to higher Leave support in Brexit referenda in more exposed areas.

Mechanisms: More hostile attitudes or heightened salience?

On the demand side, natives’ attitudes show no significant shifts in average anti-immigrant sentiments, though there are slight declines in the most positive cultural and welfare evaluations. On the supply side, MPs’ migration salience rises in constituencies with dispersed asylum seekers; however, Labour MPs do not show systematic shifts in speech content, suggesting that Conservative MPs actively channel local discontent rather than reflect broad hostility in discourse. These findings imply that political responses to dispersion operate more through representation than through widespread attitude changes.

Conclusions

While the study period ends in 2019, subsequent UK developments suggest enduring dynamics: mainstream parties’ attempts to manage anti-immigration sentiment can be effective but are not universally durable. The political landscape has since seen shifts toward other anti-immigration platforms, illustrating the volatility of public discourse and the limits of moderating strategies that rely solely on rhetoric rather than addressing local conditions. Key references include Alesina & Tabellini (2024), Dustmann et al. (2019), Hangartner et al. (2019), and Card (2001), among others.

References

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