The Refugee Crisis from Both Sides: Attitudes towards and of Syrian Refugees

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Nearly 100 million of the world’s inhabitants today have been forced to flee their homes. Integrating this population into host communities has become a major concern for policymakers and local citizens alike. Yet, the bulk of the existing research focuses on the integration of regular migrants who choose to move from their home countries in pursuit of education or better job opportunities. Unlike regular migration, refugee crises bring influxes of newcomers to communities all at once exacerbating any pre-existing pressures on local infrastructures and intensifying contentious politics surrounding immigrant integration.

Most existing research tends to focus on either the attitudes of host population members towards refugees, or refugees towards integration into local communities. Rarely are differing perspectives of both refugees and host population members brought together within the same intellectual space. This panel proposes to bring together the views of both of these populations providing more nuanced understandings of refugee integration and inclusion across different contexts and realms.

Two of the panel papers consider spatial integration. Ferree and Kao seek to understand the extent to which residential segregation among refugee and host population members is driven by individual preferences to live next to one’s coethnics versus other contextual variations that often accompany neighborhoods dominated by differing ethnic groups. Refugees are often forced to live in poorer, service-deprived, and insecure neighborhoods; conjoint experiments in Jordan and Turkey evaluate whether residential segregation is the result of these contextual factors versus outgroup prejudice. Türkoglu studies Turkish preferences concerning where refugees should be allowed to reside and finds that in- versus out-group dynamics are important. Sunni Muslim refugees are allowed to intermix within local communities while locals prefer that Christian refugees are sent to camps at the border. Overall though, Turkish preferences about refugee residential segregation are highly stable and are largely unaffected by refugee characteristics.

Alrababa’h et al. present original evidence from a multi-year panel survey to consider perspectives of Syrians refugees facing local hostility and economic and political crisis in Lebanon. Their work interrogates how reported preferences for repatriation among refugees map onto actual behaviors. The implications of this work are particularly important given the guarantees of non-refoulement in the international human rights conventions protecting refugees.

Finally, taking us to Germany where refugees were welcomed with open arms during the 2015 European “migration crisis,” Lo and Lang’s work reveals how the media affect refugee inclusion over time. The study innovatively combines media corpus analysis with a randomized survey experiment of host population members.

Together, these papers offer a fresh set of empirical tests and theoretical arguments from differing contexts that deepen our understanding of forced migrant integration and offer policy prescriptions for improving migrant integration.

Sub Unit

• Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

Individual Presentations

• Neighborhood Integration: Cross-National Comparisons of Refugee Segregation - Karen E. Ferree, University of California, San Diego; Kristen Kao, University of Gothenburg

• How International Aid Shapes Local Attitudes toward Refugees - Ahmet Akbiyik, Harvard University; Melani Cammett, Harvard University

• Preferences for Refugee Settlement - Oguzhan Turkoglu, Hertie School

• Refugees in Modern Media: Evidence from Germany - Adeline Lo, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Oliver Markus Lang, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Chair

• Claire Leslie Adida UCSD

Discussants

• Rahsaan Maxwell New York University

• Rawan Arar University of Washington