How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers

Abstract

(2), and this number is likely to be higher in 2016 as asylum-seekers embark on new and even more dangerous routes to Europe after the implementation of the refugee deal between the European Union and Turkey (3).As more and more people flee war-torn countries and persecution, refugee-receiving democracies must confront a fundamental challenge: how to honor international commitments-including treaties like the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention-to process asylum claims and provide shelter to accepted refugees, while at the same time developing asylum policies that are supported by domestic voters.As Fig. 1 shows, there is considerable heterogeneity in the exposure of European countries to the asylum crisis. While some countries, like Germany and Sweden, process a large number of asylum applications per capita, others, like the United Kingdom and Czech Republic, share a comparatively small responsibility. Yet the migrant crisis has been so severe that it has resulted in political conflict and social tensions widely across Europe, including extreme right-wing parties mobilizing citizens around asylum issues (4), frequent arson attacks on asylum centers (5), and the partial closing of Schengen borders.As the crisis threatens national solidarity, the social contract, and continental unity, European policymakers face increasing public pressure to find policy solutions. While public preferences may 3 not always directly translate into policies, a sizable political science literature has shown that in democratic countries, particularly salient and high-profile public policies often respond markedly to public opinion (6-8). In the context of this study, a case in point is the recent "Brexit" referendum in the United Kingdom (UK) in which the public voted for the UK to exit the European Union, a decision that has been attributed to rising anti-immigrant backlash in the UK (9). And while public opinion is a crucial factor, a key problem for both academic scholars and policymakers alike is a lack of knowledge as to why some native-born citizens oppose and others support the welcoming of particular asylum-seekers. FIG. 1 ABOUT HEREA large literature has examined public attitudes toward immigrants (10), ethnic minorities (11), and Muslims (12, 13) in general, but far fewer studies have looked at attitudes toward asylum-seekers (14-21). These latter studies have provided important insights into the correlates of anti-asylumseeker sentiment, but either they are limited to particular countries, or they rely on observational data from standard survey questions that ask about asylum-seekers in general and do not use experiments to differentiate between different types of asylum-seekers (22). Furthermore, they have mostly been conducted prior to the current asylum crisis. There still exists very little systematic and experimental evidence to inform the heated ongoing political debates over asylum policies with the voice of European voters. In particular, we lack a comprehensive assessment that captures which particular types o...

Towards a Fair Distribution Mechanism for Asylum

“…Arguably, in the context of asylum in which by definition, people are in disadvantaged and vulnerable situations, it is a more reasonable policy to give priority to the worst-off. There is empirical evidence that this agrees with a widespread intuition in many receiving countries [2]. This suggests that satisfying preferences is not a reasonable policy in instances in which it violates maximum cardinality.…”

“…Good matches are important because a refugee's international protection needs, and her opportunities to flourish, are served differently in different countries. Moreover, a country's costs for hosting refugees and the public opinion towards them may differ for different types of refugees, which may affect policy makers' willingness to comply with international legal norms [2].…”

Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers

“…Can the Dublin countries forge a consensus, or do domestic preferences vary so widely as to rule out any institutional reform that would fairly allocate asylum seekers? While some scholars have examined public attitudes toward asylum seekers in general [12,13,14,15], we are not aware of other studies that cross-nationally examine mass attitudes on how to allocate asylum seekers in the CEAS. Moreover, there is a general lack of evidence regarding domestic support for the design of international institutions.…”

The Organizational Design of High-Tech Startups and Product Innovation

“…In contrast to other related methods, for instance propensity score matching, entropy balancing induces covariate balance directly, and not as the result of a propensity score matching procedure (which requires iterated re-specifications of the propensity score estimation to achieve covariate balance). Entropy balancing has been applied for sample balancing in several recent studies (e.g., Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner, 2016;Malesky and Taussig, 2016;Satyanath, Voigtländer, and Voth, 2017). Technical details on the derivation of the entropy balancing weights are provided in Appendix B.…”