Attitudes to Climate Migrants: Results from a Conjoint Survey Experiment in Denmark

Abstract

As global warming increases the temperature of the planet, so does the likelihood that European countries will be faced with climate migrants. Since climate migrants cannot apply for asylum, they would need public and political support to gain residency in the countries to which they migrate. In this article, I show how likely Danes are to grant residency to climate migrants compared to other types of migrants and explore what individual‐level factors explain variations in this. I answer the two questions by combining the results of a conjoint survey experiment with an election survey. The results show that climate migrants are perceived to be less deserving of permanent residency than migrants who typically could qualify for asylum, but more likely to be deemed deserving than those who could broadly be called economic migrants. The results also show that three factors explain variations in this – attitudes to climate change, attitudes to migration and ideology.

Migrants and Welfare States

“…The first of the attributes, civil war, is not significantly different from the reference category for any of the four countries, probably because our respondents see it as more or less the same. Next, we see that climate change has a negative impact, meaning that they are less prone to receive residency (see also Hedegaard, 2021). In Germany, for example, being a climate migrant is estimated to have a 12-percentage point lower acceptance rate than a personally persecuted migrant, all else being equal.…”

Climate Migrants or Climate Refugees? Danes’ Attitudes to Whether Climate Migrants Should Have the Right to Apply for Asylum

“…Turning from attitudes to migration in general to climate migrants I nd the same overall pattern. The three studies from the European context nd that people who vote for more right-leaning parties and/or hold more climate change sceptic values or attitudes are less to grant climate migrants access to their countries (Arias & Blair, 2022;Hedegaard, 2022;Helbling, 2020). Based on this I formulate the next two hypotheses: Hypothesis 2 Danes who reject the existence of climate change are less likely to agree that migrants should be able to apply for asylum.…”

“…The study compares climate migrants, who left because of droughts or rising sea levels, to political refugees and economic migrants. The second is by Hedegaard(2022) who draws on a conjoint experiment on attitudes to granting permanent residency conducted in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. The study again compares reasons to leave the origin country and overall favorability in the population.…”

“…Thus, the policies regarding this type of migrant might be very dependent on whether the populations are supportive giving them the right to apply for asylum. Though there is a budding literature about the general attitudes to climate migrants in different countries (Arias & Blair, 2022;Hedegaard, 2022;Helbling, 2020), then there is no knowledge about this subject. Therefore, I ask the following questions: Do the Danish population think that climate migrants should be treated as asylum seekers and what explains variations in these attitudes?…”

Interactions between migrant race and social status in predicting acceptance of climate migrants in Norway

“…Despite an extensive literature on attitudes to immigrants and immigration, there is limited evidence on public opinion toward climate migrants as a distinct social and political category. An emerging stream of research indicates that climate migrants are more acceptable than economic migrants to citizens in high-income countries (Arias and Blair 2022;Hedegaard 2021;Helbling 2020). In the present study, we expand on previous work by considering public opinion to climate migrants in a new national context, Norway.…”