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Anti-immigrant sentiments are a widespread occurrence across Europe. Various theories relating to intergroup relationships suggest that host societies may experience increased feelings of antagonism in times of an economic crisis, although empirical findings have been inconclusive. We approach the 2008 peak of the global financial crisis as a natural experiment and employ the Difference-in-Differences method to analyse the effect of economic conditions on anti-immigrant sentiments in a more dynamic setting by studying the effects of both changing subjective and objective economic conditions. We find that the countries that experienced a drop in GDP/c growth paired with a rise in unemployment, and those that suffered from an increase in the average level of income insecurity between 2006 and 2010, experienced an increase in the level of anti-immigrant attitudes. Furthermore, our results suggest that part of the effect of worsening economic conditions is mediated by emotional well-being. We find that the mediation effect amounts to 23.74% and 49.03% in the objective and subjective models respectively.