The Role of Humanitarianism in Shaping Public Attitudes Toward Refugees

Abstract

Most studies that explore attitudes towards immigration conceptualize immigrants as economic migrants. The limitation of this approach is that it emphasizes economic costs and benefits while ignoring the humanitarian logic that forms the basis of refugee admission. To date, few studies have developed and tested theories that explain public support for admitting humanitarian migrants. Our article fills this gap. We argue that dispositional and situational triggers related to humanitarianism shape public attitudes towards refugees: When natives are predisposed to help others in need (humanitarianism) and/or refugees are seen to be victims of randomly occurring events, the public is more likely to support refugee admission. We test this theory using observational and experimental data from a country that accepts few resettlement refugees, Japan. Our study uses a ratingbased conjoint which randomized crisis event, place of origin, access to public housing, and degree of political support for receiving refugees. We find that humanitarianism predicts public support for admitting refugees more strongly than it predicts support for economic migrants. Moreover, we show that people with a higher level of humanitarianism prefer to admit refugees who flee natural disasters and wars as opposed to those who escape from political repression.

The European refugee crisis and public support for the externalisation of migration management

“…Although the designs of these 'cooperative containment policies' vis-à-vis irregular migrants and asylum seekers have varied in practice, they are fundamentally about a 'tit-for-tat exchange of cash for migration control' (Adamson & Tsourapas, 2019, p. 121). Examples include US assistance to many Latin America countries to help strengthen borders controls (e.g., Fitzgerald, 2019), return and readmission agreements (e.g., Billet, 2010; European Court of Auditors, 2020), or the 'Jordan Compact', whereby Jordan, host of large numbers of refugees, recently granted work permits to Syrian refugees in exchange for financial assistance and preferential trade terms from high-income countries (e.g., Betts & Collier, 2017;Lenner & Turner, 2019). 5.…”

“…Despite its important role in addressing complex cross-national policy problems, we know relatively little about voters' preferences for international cooperation on migration management and refugee protection. This is all the more surprising given that such policies are also used in the United States and Central America (Fitzgerald, 2019). One reason for the current gap in the literature is that cross-country cooperation agreements in this policy area (as in other policy fields) are complex to analyse because they are inherently multidimensional.…”

The trade-off between admitting and paying: Experimental evidence on attitudes towards asylum responsibility-sharing

“…Because of humanitarian concerns, many are willing to help refugees; however, because of national interests (e.g., bogus asylum claims), some are concerned about admitting refugees (Jeannet et al, 2021). More precisely, the rather limited amount of research on refugee and asylum policy preferences finds that a heightened sense of humanitarianism (Fraser and Murakami, 2022), low fear of terrorism (De Coninck, 2020), identification with left-leaning and green-leaning parties (Gravelle, 2019), and being a citizen of an extensive welfare state and a historically immigration-oriented country (Koos and Seibel, 2019) are positively associated with a preference for liberal refugee and asylum policies.…”

Other-Regarding Behaviors and Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers

“…In this vein, previous studies also illustrate how some macro-indicators, such as institutional context and adherence to international norms, influence reactions against refugee flows and policies on asylum seeking (Hamlin 2014; Joppke 1997; Thielemann 2003). In addition to the macro-level factors, scholars draw attention to some underlying micro-level drivers in shaping public support for the refugee admission: the role of religious affiliation (Bansak et al 2016; Cowling and Anderson 2019), humanitarian values (Fraser and Murakami forthcoming), right-wing political views (Anderson and Ferguson 2018; Canetti et al 2016), and perceived threats (Ferwerda, Flynn, and Horiuchi 2017; Hartley and Pedersen 2015).…”