I’m sorry, I am much too exhausted to leave a detailed comment, but this reminds me of the book “The Lines Between Us”, which looked at how people’s perceptions of immigrants changed over time when they were exposed to an immigrant population regularly. It’s a really good book if you’re into that kind of thing. I wish I could go more into it because it’s fascinating, but I would just butcher any quote I tried to pull from memory.

Is that causal or correlative?