Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in xenophobic and anti-refugee sentiments across European societies. How are immigrants adjusting to this rise in xenophobic sentiment? Existing theory offers two contrasting predictions. One the one hand, immigrants may respond to prejudice and discrimination by withdrawing from the host society and retreating into their own ethnic enclaves. On the other hand, heightened hostility may push immigrants to assimilate more quickly in order to avoid discrimination. Finally, the viability of each of these strategies may vary across immigrant groups depending upon their prospects of “passing” into the mainstream.

Against this backdrop, we study if immigrants in Germany assimilate or retreat in response to exogenous shocks in anti-immigrant sentiment and whether these reactions vary across immigrant groups. We exploit the sudden increase anti-immigrant sentiment following the 2016 Berlin Christmas Market attack. We operationalise assimilation via the names that immigrant parents choose for their children and use a discontinuity design to analyse the change in the naming patterns of immigrants, focusing on whether the “Germanness” of newly born childrens’ names changes over time. Since the timing of births relative to the attack is effectively “random”, parents whose children were born prior to the attack should be similar to parents whose children were born afterwards. Thus, any change in naming patterns can be plausibly attributed as reactions to the xenophobic sentiments brought about by the attack itself.

To answer our research questions, we use population registry data of children born in Germany between 2014 and 2018, requested from the twenty largest cities of Germany. At the time of writing this abstract, we have received information from 9 of the 20 contacted registry offices. The preliminary results from 327,305 births between 2014 and 2018 indicate that, following the attack, parents of children with Syrian and Ukrainian nationality chose names that are more typical of the German majority. This is not the case for more established immigrant groups such as those with Turkish, Italian, or Spanish migration background. These findings suggest that in the face of heightened hostility, newer immigrant groups accelerate their cultural assimilation.