Examines immigration's effect on social trust of natives, suggesting public services can mitigate negative impacts.
This paper examines the impact of immigration on natives' social trust in the context of China's mass internal migration. Combining individual-level information on social trust and county-level information on immigration rate, we employ the instrumental variable strategy and find that immigration has a significant negative impact on trust among native residents. The impact of immigration on trust is more salient for trust in weak ties than trust in strong ties, and from a compositional perspective, the impact of low-skilled immigrants is more salient than that of high-skilled immigrants. Additional analyses suggest that better public services can buffer the impact of immigration on trust, implying a key role in public policy.
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Cai et al. (2026) studied this question.
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