| Popis: |
The global refugee protection regime is based on a framework of group-based persecution. It was developed in the aftermath of World War II as a response to Nazi persecution of people because of their ethnicity, religion, politics, sexual orientation, disability, or other social identity. After the war, the United States and its Western allies saw the Refugee Convention as a chance to codify international protection from the Soviet Union’s political persecution of democracy advocates. As such, the resulting 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees (Refugee Convention) includes protections from non-refoulement (non-return) for only those people who are persecuted because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, political opinion, or some other “particular social group.” In the decades since the Convention was concluded, persecution practices – and the causes for displacement – have changed, leading to broader and more versatile claims for protection than those originally envisaged by the Refugee Convention. Unlike most non-refugee migrants’ case for admission to another country, which often involve their skills, resources, family relationships, or other traits, refugees’ claim to admission depends on a moral argument divorced from their individual background or attributes. The claim is that their own states have failed them by putting their lives or safety at risk. They have been rendered stateless, either de jure or de facto, and have little choice but to seek protection elsewhere. Thus, the argument goes, the international community, including other states, have a moral obligation to not send them back and to provide them at least some of the protections associated with citizenship in that country. To remain stable, however, refugee-receiving countries’ selectorates must accept the moral legitimacy of this argument: that, although the country likely would not otherwise have chosen them as residents, their terrible predicament creates a moral obligation to do so. As the nature and context of refugee claims has broadened, people in refugee-receiving countries have increasingly questioned both the factual basis and moral foundation of (some) refugee-based claims for protection, triggering global backlash to refugees. One important reason for this backlash is job-market competition; another reason is socio-cultural clashes of religious, language, and cultural identities. But another significant component is the view that at least some fraction of refugees is undeserving, based on varying beliefs about the meaning of the Refugee Convention and its appropriate application to today’s conflicts. So what types of predicaments morally obligate a state to accept and protect a person whom it otherwise would not have been willing to admit? How do people in different receiving countries determine who deserves access to refugee protection? Do receiving communities prefer some groups of refugees to others? Based on the global refugee regime and its moral justification, the public likely has preferences in these areas. It may be that the most desirable refugees are those that have suffered the worst hardship – mass killings or other severe violence – or that are likely to suffer those hardships if forced to return. Or it may be that people fleeing certain types of pernicious evils – such as violent religious extremism or racism – are seen as more deserving. Or it may be that citizens’ preferences more closely track the logic of the Refugee Convention, favoring those who would be persecuted on account of a particular demographic trait, such as ethnicity, religion, or gender, or because of political activism. While a large literature covers the legal requirements of the international refugee system and its incorporation into domestic law, little or no existing empirical research explores people’s preferences for refugee acceptance, or their conceptualization of refugee deservingness. In a different context – that of regular domestic immigration – a series of empirical studies, some based on survey experiments, have measured the traits that make prospective migrants more or less desirable to citizens. For example, Hainmueller and Hopkins (2015) find that Americans of all backgrounds and ideologies prefer more educated immigrants in higher-status occupations who speak English well. Generally, because migrants and refugees have different moral claims to reside in a host country, we might expect that citizens have a different set of preferences for refugees than they have for migrants. However, migration policies and preferences likely have a “spillover” effect to the refugee context, because people believe that those refugees are in fact economic migrants, adjusting their preferences accordingly. The result is that two different sets of expectations and preferences may affect citizens’ preferences concerning refugee acceptance and deservingness: the first linked to the type and gravity or the abuses they suffer, and the second linked to general migration preferences. This study therefore sets out to determine what conditions and traits people around the world believe make a person deserving of legally protected refuge, and how those attitudes interact with the formal legal standards that determine who actually becomes a refugee. It also examines potential linkage between refugee and migration preferences and beliefs. |
