Analyzing US Local Government Officials’ Support for Refugee Settlement

• In Event: Public Support for War, Refugees, and International Cooperation

Abstract

While scholars have investigated citizen attitudes towards immigrants, we know much less about the attitudes of local policymakers in spite of their critical role in recruiting and supporting new migrants. For instance, local officials influence economic and social programs that affect “pull factors” such as community receptivity and job opportunity. Furthermore, recent political developments have strengthened this role. In September 2019, a US Executive Order empowered local and state officials with a de facto veto over the settlement of refugees in their jurisdictions. As a result, local governments in North Dakota, Minnesota, Virginia, and Colorado have already voted on whether to allow refugee resettlement, with further votes pending.

This paper evaluates how migrant attributes affect local policymaker receptivity to refugee resettlement. In coordination with CivicPulse, we use conjoint questions embedded in a survey to measure local decisionmakers’ perspective on potential migrant settlement in their locality. The survey samples a panel of current elected local government officials, such as mayors and county commissioners. We base our survey questions on the canonical immigration conjoint experiment conducted by Hainmueller and Hopkins (2015), with two major changes: 1.) rather than assessing attitudes towards individual migrants, we focus on the characteristics of migrant groups, as it is more relevant for policymakers to consider groups rather than individuals; and 2.) we uniquely survey local government officials who—in the rapidly shifting landscape of refugee settlement in the US—have been newly empowered to veto refugee resettlement. A parallel nationally-representative public opinion survey allows us to evaluate the potential gap in preferences on refugee settlement held by constituents versus their elected officials. Findings have implications for both the growing academic literature on immigration and for advocacy organizations and government officials operating in a changing environment.

Authors

• Robert Shaffer, Syracuse University

• Jonathan Art Chu, National University of Singapore

• Lauren Pinson, University of Texas at Dallas

• Beth A. Simmons, University of Pennsylvania