Out of sight, out of mind? Terror in the home country, family reunification options, and the well-being of refugees

Abstract

• Most refugees flee to escape terror and violence. • Terror might still have psychological effects when distance eliminates direct exposure. • We find strong and adverse effects of terror intensity in the home country on the life satisfaction reported by refugees in Germany. • Effects on symptoms of psychological distress indicate that strong emotions could be a relevant mechanism. • The effect is short-lived for most refugees, except when they have family members abroad without options for reunification. In this paper, we ask whether the main cause of asylum migration, that is, violence in the home country, still affects the life satisfaction of refugees even after they reach a safe country. We combine individual-level survey data on refugees in Germany with country-level data on terror fatalities. The timing of the survey interviews generates exogenous variation in the intensity of recent terror activity in respondents’ countries of origin, which we exploit to assess the effect of terror fatalities on the level of self-reported life satisfaction. Our results indicate that fatalities due to terror activity reduce, on average, the level of life satisfaction reported by refugees. We find that this effect is most substantial for events occurring one or two days before the interview, while older events have no effect. However, we observe an effect of fatalities during the four weeks preceding the interview on persons who have a family member abroad. We show that the group of respondents with a rejected or pending asylum application without legal family reunification options mostly drives this effect.