Political Agency Under Hostility: How Elite Rhetoric Reshapes Migrant Engagement

Research on hostile political communication focuses predominantly on its effects on the general public. This paper shifts the lens to its direct targets, investigating how the elite-driven anti-immigrant communication environment shapes the political agency of migrants with critical consequences for democratic engagement. I argue that hostile rhetoric, measured at the elite level, creates a political climate that triggers a strategic recalibration among migrants. I develop and test a framework outlining two core, resource-dependent responses: retaliatory integration, where migrants increase political engagement in the host country to defend their standing, and reactive transnationalism, where they strategically deepen ties to their origin country while disengaging from host-state institutions. The choice between these pathways is structured by a migrant’s level of host-country embeddedness, their perceived political efficacy, and the nature of the localized threat. To assess this, I employ a novel multi-level longitudinal design. Individual-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) is linked with municipal data on local hostility manifestations (far-right mobilization, hate crimes) and a direct measure of elite anti-immigrant rhetoric derived from Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data. Using two-way fixed effects models, I identify the causal effect of this hostile communication environment on a spectrum of migrant outcomes—from political participation and institutional trust to remittances and return intentions—while testing the individual-level factors that explain strategic divergence. The study makes three key contributions. It provides the first large-scale causal evidence linking the elite communication environment to the political strategies of its migrant targets. Theoretically, it advances a dynamic model of political agency under hostility, explaining when and why hostility leads to contestation or exit. Substantively, it reveals the democratic repercussions of intolerant rhetoric by showing how it actively reconfigures the boundaries of political belonging, testing the inclusivity and resilience of democratic systems themselves.