Border walls and smuggling spillovers

A growing number of states are erecting physical barriers along their borders to stem the illicit flow of goods and people. Though border fortification policies are both controversial and politically salient, their distributional consequences remain largely unexplored. We study the impact of a border wall project on smuggling in Israel. We use the initial phase of the wall construction to causally estimate spillover effects on cross-border smuggling, especially vehicle theft. We find a large decrease in smuggling of stolen vehicles in protected towns and a similar substantial increase in not-yet-protected towns. For some protected towns, fortification also arbitrarily increased the length of smuggling routes. These township-level shocks further deterred smuggling (6% per kilometer). Our findings suggest that border fortification may have uneven distributional consequences, creating unintended winners and losers

The allure of distant war drums: refugees, geography, and foreign policy preferences in Turkey

Previous research argues that countries often intervene in the conflicts that cause refugees to flow across their borders. Public opinion against refugees may pressure states to intervene to ‘solve the refugee problem.’ We study what shapes public support for such intervention using a survey experiment in Turkey against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis. We survey over 1,200 respondents with varied exposure to refugees, and randomize information about the consequences of hosting refugees to examine its effects on support for intervention in Syria. Emphasizing the negative externalities of hosting refugees, including their connection with militants, increases support for intervention among respondents who reside far from the Turkish-Syrian border. Closer to the border, this information reduces support for intervention in Syria. These findings highlight that vulnerability to the costs of intervention (proximity to the border) shapes public support for intervening. We also find that public opinion towards intervention is correlated with partisan identity and respondents’ daily exposure to refugees