Public Opinion on Climate Migration: Evidence of a Policy/Preferences Mismatch

• In Event: Conflict and Division in the Public Opinion and Governance of Migration

Abstract

In the coming decades, climate change has the potential to displace millions of people. Despite the impending scale of climate displacement, there has been minimal research on public opinion toward climate change-displaced migrants. Current domestic and international legal definitions of a refugee exclude migrants displaced by climate change, instead focusing on persecution as the criteria for asylum or refugee status. Do these criteria match the public’s preferred criteria for refugee/asylum admissions? Using experiments embedded in a US survey, I find that Americans hold preferences for including certain types of climate change-induced displacement in the criteria for refugee admissions, representing a mismatch between policy and public preferences. I also investigate whether findings from the immigration attitudes literature on the role of in-group favoritism are robust to changes in the prospective migrant’s reason for migrating and the respondent's own experience with some of these factors. In particular, I test whether Americans’ personal experience with the impacts of climate change—a growing number of Americans—moderates attitudes toward climate change-displaced migrants, a novel contribution to the literatures on the role of threat (i) in shaping attitudes toward immigration and immigrants, (ii) in shaping preferences on immigration policy, and (iii) in shaping preferences for climate change mitigation policies.

Author

• Gabriel De Roche, University of California, San Diego