Foreign Policy Debates Shape Refugees' Psychological Integration

Refugee integration is a central policy challenge. Expanding on prior research on policy debates targeting immigrants, we examine whether host country debates about military aid to refugees' homeland shape their psychological integration. In a survey experiment with 2,631 Ukrainian refugees in Germany, participants viewed authentic statements by German politicians expressing varying levels of support for military aid. On average, these messages had no detectable effect. Yet, this null masks important heterogeneity. By linking our experiment to daily variation in national news coverage, we find that when ambient media salience is low, exposure to any political statement on military aid---supportive or opposing---reduces psychological integration. These effects vanish when the issue is already prominent in the media. We argue that this pattern reflects a contestation mechanism: refugees interpret the very visibility of political debate, rather than its specific content, as a signal that host-country support is contested and potentially less secure.