Are Climate Migrants Treated Differently than Other Migrants?

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CHAPTERS 

[00:01:59]: Public perceptions of migrants: comparing climate, labor, and refugee categories 

[00:04:21]: Measuring public opinion: how conjoint experiments capture migration preferences 

[00:07:24]: Internal vs. international migration: does origin affect public support? 

[00:08:06]: Climate-related displacement in the Global South: patterns and implications 

[00:15:00]: Terminology and policy: how labels shape debates on climate-related migration 

[00:19:43]: Empathy and public attitudes toward climate-related migrants 

[00:22:31]: Policy framing and public response: potential risks and trade-offs 

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:02.10] 

Hi, welcome to another episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration from the Migration Policy Institute. This is a podcast that explores how climate change is affecting human movement. I'm your host, Julian Hattem. I'm also the editor of MPI's journal, the Migration Information Source. This series is being produced in conjunction with a collection of articles about climate change and migration, which you can find online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. One issue we haven't really discussed before on this podcast is how destination communities react to new migrants. There have at times been some serious tensions between host communities and new arrivals, and you don't have to look too far these days to see how hostility can emerge between these groups. That can be the case whether the migrants are moving domestically or across international borders. And not all immigrants, however, are greeted the same way. Things like their ethnic background, religion, and places of origin can all affect how warmly new arrivals are greeted by host communities. Another factor is why the migrants move there. The same community that might bristle at large numbers of so called labor immigrants might be more welcoming towards refugees and asylum seekers. One group might be interpreted as a threat to the host community's employment prospects or cultural systems, while another can be seen as a vulnerable group in need of protection.

[00:01:22.15] 

But what about migrants displaced by the impacts of climate change? My guests today have researched precisely this question, and so I was eager to have them on the podcast to discuss their work. Sabrina Arias and Chris Blair are PhD candidates at the University of Pennsylvania. And starting in the fall of 2022, Chris will be starting as an assistant professor at Princeton. So, Sabrina, Chris, thank you guys so much for coming on. It's a pleasure to have you.

[00:01:45.07] 

Thanks for having us.

[00:01:46.08] 

Yeah, thank you.

[00:01:47.15] 

So let's start at the top level with the basic question. How do hosts respond to migrants driven by environmental factors compared to labor migrants, refugees, other types of people on the move?

[00:01:59.15] 

So in an article in the Journal of Politics, we explored exactly this question. And I'll let Sabrina jump in to talk a bit about how we did that in terms of our survey. But I can start with a brief outline of what what we expected. In general, we can think about different categories of migrants. Like you mentioned, some might be moving for labor market reasons, some might be fleeing persecution. These would be the sorts of people that we typically think of and refer to as refugees. And then a third category of migrants are these climate migrants. And the starting point for our intervention was thinking about how perceptions of deservingness and self responsibility for the causes of flight impact differences in evaluation of these different categories of Migrants. And so we argue and find evidence that climate migrants represent this sort of intermediate category. They're perceived as more deserving than people moving for strictly economic reasons, such as in search of a better job, but less deserving than people fleeing deliberate, for instance, state persecution and other sorts of direct bodily harm, war, et cetera, traditional causes of refugee flows. And so in the paper, we do a few different surveys to kind of unpack these attitudes.

[00:03:17.22] 

But the bottom line is that consistent with what we argue, perceptions of deservingness matter a lot and ultimately produce this situation where climate migrants occupy this sort of intermediate place. They're in general supported more than labor migrants, less than refugees. But overall, there's fairly extensive support, at least in the US And Germany, the two countries that we study for hosting climate migrants.

[00:03:43.23] 

Yeah. And so the way that we test this research question, right. What we're particularly interested in is does the reason that a migrant is moving affect public support for resettling that migrant? We decided to turn to a survey experiment. But one thing that was important to us was to capture a realistic context for these different migrant profiles. And if we just did a very simple experiment like here's a migrant. They're moving for this reason versus this reason, it doesn't capture the complexity of that real experience and the bundle of features that make up a different migrant profile. So in order to capture the complexity of this real life decision, we decided to use a type of experiment called a conjoint design. These were really pioneered in market research that allowed these market researchers to vary all of the different features of a product that people were interested in. Its size, its price, its colors, all these different types of things. This has been a method that is gaining more popularity in the study of migration because it allows you to build a realistic profile of what an individual might look like. We're able to include our key research question, the reason a person is migrating, and vary this at the same time as other factors that we know are really important.

[00:05:01.22] 

So things like their fluency with the native language, their occupation, their country or region of origin. And we can change all of these different things at the same time to not only build a realistic scenario, but to also see how these things matter in importance relative to each other. And so what we find, as Chris said, is that the reason for migration matters a lot. People are most sympathetic towards people fleeing persecution. So this would be like asylum seekers. They're least sympathetic towards people looking for better economic opportunities. These are kind of labor migrants, and climate migrants fall in the middle. And we tested three different Causes of climate migration, drought, flooding and wildfires. Some of these are fast onset things, right, and like a flood, and some of them are slow onset, like a drought. We find that doesn't matter so much. People give the same sympathy across all the different climate reasons. There are other factors that matter a lot. People's English fluency or German fluency in that context is also super important. But we find that the kind of magnitude, the size of the effect of the reason for migration is almost as large as changing from broken English fluency to high fluency.

[00:06:15.19] 

So it is really substantively important in understanding how likely people in these communities are to be willing to resettle climate migrants.

[00:06:24.09] 

That's super fascinating because I know generally speaking a lot of these issues, language fluency, as you discussed, cultural background, religious background, etcetera, can influence host communities and new arrivals relationships, which of course has tremendous impact on how those people get along. I guess I want to drill down a tiny bit further here. I mean, did you find other factors that affect this relationship? For instance, whether people were moving internally or domestically versus internationally or the host community's perceptions about climate change in general, did that have any bearing on what people thought about prospective new quote unquote, climate arrivals, climate migrants?

[00:07:01.14] 

That's a great question. And it's something that we, we really dug into to look at whether people moving within a country or from another country were going to be perceived differently. So in the paper we break this out by all profiles, internal profiles and profiles. We find that the same pattern of results holds across the board, regardless of source, which is a little bit surprising. You know, you might think that people are more supportive of settling individuals from their own country, but no, in fact, we find it's pretty high across the board.

[00:07:32.06] 

And your research was in the US and Germany, right, which are wealthy countries, of course, in the Global North. But as the research shows, most migration prompted by climate change will probably be not towards the US and Germany, but towards countries of the Global south, developing countries. And I know that there has been research on this also.

[00:07:50.13] 

Right.

[00:07:50.21] 

Which has maybe found other results. Can you talk a little bit about that? Particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia. I mean, what, I guess what is the broader universe of research shown on this issue and how might that comport with or contrast with your findings?

[00:08:05.02] 

Well, you're absolutely right that the Global South is the predominant host of all categories of forcibly displaced people, whether refugees or climate migrants around the world today. In terms of refugees, the number stands at about 85% of these people are displaced from and hosted within Global south settings. And so our focus on the Global North is not at all to discount the importance of understanding attitudes in those environments. But we do think that in longer Spanish over the next few decades, the follow on effects of climate migration and other sorts of forced displacement in the Global South mean that we will increasingly also see flows from the Global South to the Global North as a result of climate change and flows within the Global North itself. So both countries that we focus on, the US and Germany, have actually seen displacements as a result of climate change in Germany, mostly as a result of flooding that occurs periodically in the U.S. you know, more than a million people were displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and most of those have never returned to the city. We've also seen pretty substantial displacements as a result of some other hurricanes, particularly in Florida and other Gulf states, as well as as a result of wildfires in California.

[00:09:26.20] 

And so while you're absolutely right that this phenomenon is concentrated in the Global South right now, and that's probably where most climate migrants will be coming from, the countries that we focus on are, we think, important in their own right to understand both because they may host these kind of second order climate migrants who move from a Global South country to the Global North, and because they have their own climate displacement. Now, in terms of other research, this is another great question. And our paper is one of kind of a series of papers that have emerged really in the last two years that study the question. So a quick kind of survey of the literature here. There is some work by Gabriele Spilker and co authors which focuses on Vietnam and Kenya and finds there that the climate migrants actually aren't supported as much as we find. And in particular they find that people tend to prefer kind of economic migrants. Now in the context they're studying, they're only focused on internal migrants, which is just one of the two categories, as Sabrina mentioned, that we focus on. But in line with Spilker's work, again from Vietnam and Kenya, there is also some more recent recent evidence from Rachel Castellano and co authors which looked at the same question in Dhaka in Bangladesh, and again finds that people don't really support hosting climate migrants in the Global South.

[00:10:50.03] 

Again, the setting there was internal migrants. And so there could be something happening with internal versus international migration in climate displacement in the Global South. But this is certainly a good question for future research and something that we've also kind of grappled with a lot here. One possibility is that in the Global North countries that we studied, the capacity of communities to provide financial resources for hosting is much higher. So the kind of baseline level of support could be higher as a result of that mere integration or hosting, like fiscal capacity. In our kind of models of migration preferences, one of the other factors that we think about is labor market competition. And in a global south setting, in an internal displacement setting, we might think that the kind of people moving, say to an urban area or a capital because their farm has been eroded or exposed to flooding or something like that, are going to be more likely to be competing with people living in the urban areas of a global south country for jobs and other sorts of resources. Whereas in the Global North settings that we study, that sort of labor market competition dimension may not be as salient, particularly for international migration.

[00:12:08.15] 

Sabrina, do you have anything you want to add there?

[00:12:11.06] 

No. I would just say that these questions about understanding differences in the Global North and South is relatively unexplored in our field. And in general, understanding attitudes towards climate change in the Global South is not very well captured so far in the literature. We know a lot about how Americans feel about climate change. We know quite a bit about how Europeans feel about climate change and migration. So in future work, Chris and I are working on better understanding how climate attitudes are developed and shaped using a variety of geolocated data. We're going to focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. In that project, we want to understand how does vulnerability to the effects of climate change, how do educational reforms, how do national level commitments to global climate institutions, do any of these relate to the ways that individuals think about questions related to climate change and migration? And we're hoping that by creating a broader picture of what climate attitudes look like around the world will be able to help provide some insight into why results for these types of questions look different depending on the region you're focusing on.

[00:13:22.23] 

I can't wait for that research. That sounds super interesting. Yeah, can't wait till that comes out. Importantly, here we should note, I should note we've been using, quote, unquote, climate migrants. We've been using this term, although that is unlike refugees and unlike labor migrants, climate migrants is not a legal category, at least in terms of international movements. And as the literature kind of makes pretty clear, in many cases, when environmental factors drive migration, they tend to do so indirectly, especially in the cases of, as you guys mentioned, slow onset impacts of climate change like sea level rise, desertification, which I guess is all to say that quote, unquote, climate migration is a bit of a nebulous concept. And one person's climate migrant might be Another's labor migrant. If you know, for instance, in the example you mentioned, persistent drought makes it harder for a farmer to earn a living. Their motivations there are a bit murky. Right. And so I guess I wonder if one of the takeaways from this research is the importance of branding and how individuals become connoted, especially in the Global North, with climate migrants as opposed to other types of migration.

[00:14:26.17] 

And how. I mean, you see kind of in general news media references about climate migration in the US From Central America and the importance of this narrative as kind of being. Yeah. As contributing to this argument about deservingness, even when the individuals themselves fall into legal categories that are not climate migrants. So, yeah, I guess. What are the policy implications of this kind of work? I mean, where do you think this leads to? And how does this affect kind of the broader public narrative about different individuals prompted by different reasons?

[00:14:59.18] 

Yeah. As you hit on, there's a lot of fuzziness with respect to the term climate migrant. There's a lot of contestation about the language used to describe these individuals. Climate refugee would be a particular legal category that would require a lot of rights and obligations. An international treaty framework. Right. Because states have very specific obligations they're required to meet in providing aid and resettlement towards asylum seekers and refugees. A lot of states in the Global North are very wary of bringing on more obligations because the scope for future climate migration is huge. That's why there's so much contestation over the terminology that's used in this space in the paper. You notice in our conversation we'll use the term climate migration, climate driven migration. This is the type of language that the International Organization for Migration uses, and we follow their lead in this. A lot of advocates for support for climate migrants would make an argument that it's important to use the terminology of refugees, climate refugees, not only for the legal obligations that it creates, but for the potential to increase public support, as you suggest. Our research actually shows that that might not be necessary.

[00:16:19.11] 

We refer to the individuals in our study as climate migrants and we already find that they have a lot of support. So potentially this might imply that the added benefit in terms of public perception of shifting language from climate migrant to climate refugee might not be that big and that potential advocates might be able to avoid a lot of the conflicts that they are engaging in and be able to take advantage of the already high latent public support for these individuals, kind of regardless of what term is used to refer to them.

[00:16:56.22] 

And just one thing I want to add to that is Sabrina is absolutely right that refugee connotes a very specific set of legal obligations that countries have, which is why a lot have shied away from calling climate displaced people climate refugees. In reality, a lot of the actual migration that occurs that is plausibly related to climate change fits within what migration scholars call this kind of mixed migration paradigm, where people fleeing from Mali because their fields have been desertified may also be exposed to all sorts of land clashes and insurgent intervention into communal conflicts and things like that that are all wound up or bound up in the, in the value of land and in like climate related factors. And you know, of course, the, the evaporation of your livelihoods if you're a farmer, also means that you're going to be moving in search of, of economic opportunity. So in the real world, a lot of these categories are like, very interwoven in a way that kind of makes it hard to disentangle whether someone is just a climate migrant or are they a climate migrant and a refugee, or are they climate migrant and an economic labor market migrant.

[00:18:21.11] 

So I think that's important to remember. Again, in our experimental framework, we have a nice way of disentangling these by clearly labeling the kind of profile in question in the conjoint as moving for economic or for climate or for persecution reasons. But it's much more complicated in the real world. And just one last bit on the policy side of things, as far as I'm aware, New Zealand is the only country that has expressed public willingness to recognize asylum claims on the basis of climate related reasons. But it remains to be seen if that's something that more countries will adopt or not. Obviously, for the New Zealand case, it makes sense because they're proximate to a lot of small island nations that are likely to be hit particularly hard by climate change. Yeah.

[00:19:08.01] 

Drilling down on the policy question, I wonder to what extent sympathy or empathy towards quote, unquote, climate migrants lends itself as an argument in favor of governments doing more on climate change. Right. So if you, if publics broadly support climate migrants, it kind of stands to reason that then they would support their government doing stuff to prevent more climate migrants. This was a thing you guys also looked at, right? Whether or not there's an overlap between support for climate mitigation and climate migrants. What did you find? What's the answer there?

[00:19:37.14] 

Yeah, so first what we did was we took the results of our conjoint study, we dug into them and we found that individuals with higher levels of empathy were in fact more likely to support resettling climate migrants. So we found some evidence in support of that first step of this argument. And then we decided we were going to do a second study where we made the problem of climate migration, the threat of climate migration, more salient to respondents to see if this would increase their support for policies related to climate change migration and climate migration and the previous literature. It could go both ways. In fact, we might suspect that more empathetic individuals, because they care a lot about the problem of climate migration, want policies to help these folks get settled and get job training and all this type of thing. But we might also expect in the opposite direction that people who are really concerned about the problem of climate migration would also support policies to address the problem because they don't want climate migrants to come. So by supporting climate change policy, you thereby lessen the potential scope of migration into your country and you keep these individuals out.

[00:20:49.24] 

So either one of those mechanisms could be at work. But in both cases, you might expect to see increased support for or climate policies. We don't in fact find that. We find that there was no shift in support for climate change policies, migration policies or climate migration policies as a result of making these issues more salient to their respondents in either the US or Germany. And we think part of the reason is that climate attitudes are just so hard to move. They're very sticky. This has been found across studies in political science. They're one of the most difficult attitudes to move. So we think that might be one reason to explain our null results there. But we do still believe that there's this important role of empathy in the process, in shaping individual level support for climate migration. So in another follow up study, we are planning to try to prime empathy, that is to make individuals think of themselves as more empathetic, to reflect on times that they were empathetic, to make that attribute more important in their decision making. And once they're thinking of themselves as really empathetic individuals, are they subsequently more likely to support climate policies?

[00:21:57.22] 

So not just, you know, cutting our sample and looking at high empathy versus low empathy people, but across the board, if we make people think of themselves as more empathetic, or empathy as a more important consideration, would that have an impact on, on their attitudes? And that might have really important implications for the strategies that different types of policy advocates might want to take in framing their proposals and in trying to generate public support for them.

[00:22:21.09] 

That's super interesting. I'm also very curious to hear the results of that research. But I do wonder about potentially unintended negative consequences. You know, I can imagine that kind of drawing this connection overtly between climate change and migration could strike skeptics or you know, people opposed to like larger levels of immigration. And I guess kind of you mix all that up, I can imagine there's kind of a backlash and perhaps you know, accidentally inflame anti immigrant sentiment. Can you tell? I mean is that an issue that you guys have confronted or thought about when it comes to mixing of these issues, especially from a political and policy level, how do you consider that and what is to be done about that question?

[00:23:02.01] 

Yeah, I mean this is certainly something that we were very concerned about. You know, just at the most basic level all of our protocols went through the IRB process at the University of Pennsylvania. So we had to establish and you know, present some initial evidence that you know, look, there's no, not likely to be any like very serious increase in anti immigrant sentiment or any, any other kind of like harmful implications of the research. We in order to kind of like raise the salience of climate migration in respondents minds, we used like a very simple factual vignette treatment. So kind of like a scientific news based article treatment which is a pretty mild treatment but again for the precise reason that we were concerned about inflaming anti immigrant sentiment and ultimately we don't actually find any evidence of that as a consequence. But certainly for all researchers, especially those using survey experiments going forward, I think that that's like a really important consideration that we need to take stock of. It is like Sabrina mentioned, a difficult situation where on the one hand you have the prospect of potentially increasing willingness to pursue climate change mitigation, which is a normatively good thing that we would all like to see.

[00:24:21.02] 

And on the other hand there is this potential negative detriment in terms of general attitudes on immigration. So again that's kind of a tough balance to strike as a researcher but we're pretty confident that you know, there, there are no negative consequences and, and glad to have the IRB process as a result or for precisely that reason.

[00:24:43.12] 

That's probably about all we have time for today, but this was a super interesting discussion. Sabrina and Chris, thank you guys so much for coming on. Sabrina Arias and Christopher Blair, doctoral candidates at the University of Pennsylvania. Their article that we've been referring to is or their study is in an article called Changing Public Attitudes on Climate Migration that was published in the January 2022 issue of the Journal of Politics. And it sounds like they're working on a whole bunch of other research where if the Internet wants to find you online to stay on top of your other research. Where can they find you?

[00:25:15.23] 

Yeah, my Twitter is @SabrinaBArias. That's A R I A S and you, you can also find a link to my website on there. And I'm

[00:25:24.10] 

at @Chris_W_Blair B L A I R where you can also find my website.

[00:25:30.22] 

Awesome. Thank you guys so much. This was really fun. I appreciate it.

[00:25:33.23] 

Thank you very much for having us.

[00:25:37.03] 

Thanks for listening to this episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Subscribe to the podcast through your service of choice to catch all new episodes as we release them. You can also find all the episodes for this and every other MPI podcast [email protected] podcasts stay on top of everything MPI does by following us on social media. You can find us on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook and on Instagram. And if you have thoughts, questions or concerns about this podcast, please send me an email. You can do so at [email protected]. This episode was produced by Yoseph Hamid and made possible with the assistance of Lisa Dixon and Michelle Mittelstadt. Our music is a song called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem. I'll see you again soon.