When civil unrest hits the job market: a natural experiment on anti-immigrant riots in Spain

Abstract This study provides novel evidence on the socioeconomic consequences of anti-immigrant civil unrest in the labour market, exploiting a large-scale field experiment interrupted by the July 2025 Torre-Pacheco riots in Spain. Our results reveal how discrimination reacts dynamically to moral shocks, showing that civic mobilisation can temporarily reverse bias. We conduct an event-analysis framework that shows a sharp drop in employer responses to Muslim applicants, coinciding with a surge in online hate discourse. However, the initial discriminatory shock was followed not by passive decay but by a dynamic compensatory reversal that coincided with a phase of civic mobilisation. We confirm the existence of this initial drop using regression discontinuity models. This temporary pro-minority bias is robustly confirmed by Cox models, which show that Muslim applicants received responses significantly faster than their majority counterparts during the civic mobilisation phase. Our findings suggest that discrimination is not a stable preference but a socially contingent practice that responds to processes of moral regulation.