Research question/goal:

Across Europe, the rise of far-right parties and the mainstreaming of exclusionary, anti-immigrant rhetoric are reshaping the political landscape and creating increasingly hostile environments for immigrants. This political backlash threatens immigrant integration and poses broader challenges to democracy and social cohesion. While existing research has primarily focused on the impact of immigration on far-right voting among majority populations, far less is known about the reverse relationship: how does the electoral success of far-right parties affect immigrants themselves, and what are the consequences for their sense of belonging, political engagement, and integration?

BELONG addresses this gap by reconceptualising integration as strategic agency under threat Building on and extending Albert Hirschman’s “exit, voice, and loyalty” framework, the project theorises and maps immigrants’ responses to political backlash, explaining how strategies vary with local political climate, institutional opportunity structures, and individual characteristics. This framework enables a systematic identification of the conditions under which immigrants perceive hostility and choose among alternative courses of action.

Empirically, BELONG combines multi-country panel surveys with minority samples and geo-linked electoral and administrative data across four European countries. It applies causal inference methods on original data to captures the effects of political backlash on perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour.

In doing so, BELONG provides unprecedented depth in the study of how political backlash shapes immigrants’ strategies. It moves the research frontier by focusing on immigrants rather than on natives and by generating high-quality data on how political context shapes immigrant integration. The findings will also inform policies aimed at fostering belonging and creating conditions necessary to retain skilled migrants and sustain Europe’s ageing societies and labour markets.