The influence of refugees’ housing location on their social contacts: Evidence from a national quasi-experiment

In fleeing from war and persecution, refugees lose important social contacts from their home country and need to develop new social networks in their host country. A common conjecture is that the region where refugees settle has important influences on whether and with whom refugees develop social contacts, but establishing causal evidence has remained notoriously difficult. In this paper, we utilize the Dutch dispersal policy – which quasi-randomly allocates refugees across regions in the Netherlands – as a natural experiment to establish the causal effects of refugees' housing location on their social contacts. We use a representative longitudinal survey with 7387 observations from 3137 Syrian refugees in the Netherlands, merged with register data on the ethnic composition and urbanity of their housing region. We find that placing refugees in regions with a higher share of Dutch residents leads to more social contacts with the Dutch, and there is tentative evidence that it even leads to positive effects for social contacts within one's own origin group, and no effects on contacts with other migrants. Placing refugees in regions with a higher share of residents of Syrian descent leads to more social contacts only with other Syrians. These regional effects do not diminish over a period of five years. We find no robust effect of urbanity on social contacts. Altogether, our findings reveal how the ethnic composition of refugees' housing region shapes their social contacts, and suggest that dispersal policies can partly influence whether and with whom refugees develop social contacts.