Victim or Perpetrator: Attitudes on Deservingness and Culpability in Immigration

• In Event: Opinion and Immigration

Abstract

Recent migration “crises” in Europe and the US have increased the salience of public opinion toward refugees. Studies show that public support for refugees depends on their characteristics, including status as a victim of torture (Bansak et al. 2016) and assorted legally irrelevant categories such as job skills, religion, language, and gender (Adida et al. 2019). Yet, we know little about how beliefs about deservingness extend to the complexities of legally categorizing people. Our paper focuses on this connection, examining public attitudes toward people fleeing conflict sites, who may be simultaneously victims and suspected perpetrators of mass violence.

The growing global norm of “no safe haven” has led to a web of domestic and international policies erecting barriers for suspected perpetrators of human rights abuses or international crimes to get immigration benefits. The result is a new legal regime that blends domestic criminal and immigration laws with international criminal law to expand the scope of who is excludable (Rowen and Hamlin 2018). Cases that have been used to draw this line reveal the deep moral ambiguity inherent in making distinctions between victims and perpetrators of mass violence. Through prosecutions for immigration fraud, some may find themselves the subject of investigations, prosecutions, and removal for failing to disclose information that triggers additional questions about their role in the conflict from which they fled.

To understand how the American public views these matters, we embedded several survey experiments in a module of the 2018 CCES. We ask whether and how past behavior, specifically the degree to which individuals voluntarily or involuntarily engaged in human rights violations, changes Americans’ decisions about who deserves refugee status.

Our initial findings are striking. We find that, as predicted, support for giving immigration benefits sharply declines if applicants were involved in an armed group. We also find that factors such as the nature of the armed group and the level of the individual's involvement can cause support to shift; however, some respondents reject applicants even for low-level and involuntary participation in such groups. We also find that factors such as the nature of the armed group and the level of the individual's involvement can cause support to shift; however, some respondents reject applicants even for low-level and involuntary participation in such groups.

We use our analysis to expand upon a growing body of literature that looks at deservingness in immigration law to illustrate broader dilemmas in categorizing survivors of conflict as victims or perpetrators, and the growing challenge of implementing refugee policies that ensure vulnerable victims of war have rights to freedom of movement. Through our public opinion research, this paper illuminates how beliefs about criminality, in this case the international criminal, shape public opinion about who deserves immigration benefits and how the American public understands the causes and consequences of mass violence.

Adida, Claire L., Adeline Lo, and Melina R. Platas. 2019. “Americans Preferred Syrian Refugees Who Are Female, English-Speaking, and Christian on the Eve of Donald Trump’s Election.” PLoS ONE 14(10).

Bansak, Kirk, Jens Hainmueller, and Dominik Hangartner. 2016. “How Economic, Humanitarian, and Religious Concerns Shape European Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers.” Science: aag2147.

Rowen, Jamie and Rebecca Hamlin. 2018. “The Politics of a New Legal Regime: Governing International Crime through Domestic Immigration Law.” 40 Law & Policy 243.

Authors

• Scott Blinder, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Rebecca Hamlin, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Jamie Rowen, University Mass Amherst