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 research has largely focused on the impact of immigration on far-right voting among majority populations, far less is known about the reverse: 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 reconceptualizing integration as strategic agency under threat. Extending Albert Hirschman’s “exit, voice, and loyalty” framework, it theorizes and maps immigrant responses and explains how strategies vary with local political climate, institutional opportunity structures, and individual characteristics. This framework enables 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, it captures the effects of political backlash on perceptions, attitudes, and behavior.
In doing so, BELONG provides unprecedented depth in the study of how political backlash shapes immigrants’ strategies. It moves the research frontier by centering on immigrants rather than natives and by generating high-quality data on how political context shapes immigrant integration. The findings will also inform policies that promote belonging and create conditions essential for retaining skilled migrants and sustaining Europe’s aging societies and labor markets.
