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The Role of Humanitarianism in Shaping Public Attitudes Toward Refugees
Nicholas A. R. FraserUniversity of Toronto
Go MurakamiRitsumeikan University
Most studies that explore attitudes towards immigration conceptualize immigrants as economic migrants. The limitation of this approach is that it emphasizes economic costs and benefits while ignoring the humanitarian logic that forms the basis of refugee admission. To date, few studies have developed and tested theories that explain public support for admitting humanitarian migrants. Our article fills this gap. We argue that dispositional and situational triggers related to humanitarianism shape public attitudes towards refugees: When natives are predisposed to help others in need (humanitarianism) and/or refugees are seen to be victims of randomly occurring events, the public is more likely to support refugee admission. We test this theory using observational and experimental data from a country that accepts few resettlement refugees, Japan. Our study uses a rating- based conjoint which randomized crisis event, place of origin, access to public housing, and degree of political support for receiving refugees. We find that humanitarianism predicts public support for admitting refugees more strongly than it predicts support for economic migrants. Moreover, we show that people with a higher level of humanitarianism prefer to admit refugees who flee natural disasters and wars as opposed to those who escape from political repression.
What shapes public attitudes towards refugee policy? A growing number of studies explaining attitudes towards refugees often adopt perceived threat (or benefit) arguments which explain natives’ preference for economic immigrants. Ultimately, these studies assume that the political psychology which underlies the admission of workers and refugees is, fundamentally, the same. Yet this assump-tion flies in the face of many studies that argue that the politics of refugee admission is driven by humanitarian rather than economic considerations (Freeman, 2006; Joppke, 1997; Neumayer, 2004; Thielemann, 2003). Thus, political psychologists focused on explaining public attitudes towards economic migrants, while neglecting a different psychological process specific to refugee admission. Considering that both developed and developing countries receive large numbers of refugees, this is a major oversight within the political science literature on immigration.
Our study fills this gap by exploring the question of what distinguishes the public attitudes to-wards refugees from those towards economic migrants. We argue that both humanitarian dispositions
and situational heuristics that prompt humanitarian considerations shape public attitudes towards refugees more than they do so towards economic migrants. More specifically, we first claim that the impact of natives’ humanitarian predisposition on their policy preference for refugee admission is larger than that for economic migrant admission. Then we argue that humanitarians are more supportive of refugee admission when refugees are victims of randomly occurring events. This is because humanitarians should perceive those fleeing such events as more genuinely in need, and thus, more deserving of protection on humanitarian grounds. This reasoning should not be held when they consider the admission of economic migrants. Our study also examines the effects of threat perception. We expect that natives are prone to oppose hosting refugees who have links to rival states because those refugees are likely to pose security threats to the natives. Despite these effects, we expect that humanitarianism still explains natives’ support for refugee admission.
To test our theory of humanitarian deservingness, we devised a rating- based conjoint survey in Japan in which crisis event, refugees’ place of origin, access to public housing, and degree of political support for receiving refugees are randomized. Unlike many western countries, Japan has maintained a strict policy toward humanitarian migrants for several years. As such, the restrictive policy legacy provides a stable condition for the public to consider the protection of refugees without prior experi-ences. We find that refugees’ place of origin functions as a heuristic for threat perception: Japanese natives preferred the admission of immigrants from Taiwan more than immigrants from mainland China. We also find some evidence consistent with our humanitarian deservingness argument. First, individuals’ level of humanitarianism predicts support for admitting refugees more strongly than it predicts support for economic migrants. Second, the deservingness heuristic influences support for refugee admission: People prefer to admit refugees who flee natural disasters and civil wars as op-posed to those who escape from political repression. Third and most importantly, those with a higher level of humanitarianism are more sensitive to this deservingness heuristic.
The Gap in the Literature: Explaining Public Attitudes Towards Refugees
A common focus of the refugee- admission- politics literature has often been explaining what drives asylum recognition rates. With the aim of explaining divergent policy outcomes, previous studies focus on the demand for asylum (Vink & Meijerink, 2003) as well as the institutional rules (Hamlin, 2014) and electoral politics (Gudbrandsen, 2010; Zaun, 2018) surrounding refugee pol-icy. Taking a broader look at policy development, other studies explore what prompts countries to adopt liberal or restrictive policy trajectories (Green- Pedersen & Odmalm, 2008; Hangartner, Dinas, Marbach, Matakos, & Xefteris, 2019; Hansen, 2002). Many of these studies acknowledge the hu-manitarian logic that underpins refugee policy. Joppke (1997), for example, articulates a powerful link between refugee admission and a commitment to international norms designed to protect human rights. Thielemann (2003) shows that European states’ willingness to receive refugees is positively correlated with their commitment to international norms of refugee protection (physical protection and distributive justice). Similarly, Neumayer (2004) finds that refugee applicants who flee political repression or a humanitarian crisis (genocide, civil war, state failure) tend to push European asylum recognition rates up.
Despite this literature on refugee politics, studies on public attitudes toward refugees are typ-ically based on findings from studies of public attitudes towards economic immigration. Many of these works analyze attitudes toward economic and humanitarian immigrants in the same manner (Canetti, Snider, Pedersen, & Hall, 2016; Gravelle, 2018; Ivarsflaten, 2005). Among the few studies that focus on refugees, it is common to identify perceived economic, cultural, or security threats as key factors in explaining natives’ opposition to refugee admission (Bansak, Hainmueller, & Hangartner, 2016; Ferwerda, Flynn, & Horiuchi, 2017). Bansak et al. (2016), for example, shows that the skill- level of hypothetical asylum- seekers conditions Europeans’ support for granting protective
3Role of Humanitarianism
status to them. Their theory and findings are based on the skills premium argument (Hainmueller & Hiscox, 2010; Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; Valentino et al., 2019), which holds that natives across the developed world prefer high- skilled immigrants. Even though the skills premium argument is contested, a plethora of studies generally agree that natives use an economic rationale to justify admitting economic immigrants. Observational studies identify economic anxieties and threats as a key determinant of attitudes towards immigration. When natives’ job skills are similar to those of in-coming migrants (Mayda, 2008; Scheve & Slaughter, 2001) or work in shrinking sectors (Dancygier & Donnelly, 2014), they are more reluctant to accept immigrants for fear of competition or economic loss. Finally, studies that consider public attitudes toward redistribution illustrate how economic self- interest and concerns about increased public expenditures may drive public support for restricting immigration (Emmenegger & Klemmensen, 2013).
In terms of cultural and security threats, social psychologists have linked antirefugee sentiment to a variety of related factors: public discourse that portrays refugees negatively (McKay, Thomas, & Kneebone, 2012); refugees’ illegal entry to the host country (Murray & Marx, 2013); the differ-ence in religious affiliation between natives and refugees (Cowling & Anderson, 2019); natives’ right- wing political views (Canetti et al., 2016), and authoritarianism and social dominance orien-tation (Anderson & Ferguson, 2018; Nickerson & Louis, 2008). Several other studies indicate that realistic threats, symbolic threats, and/or intergroup anxiety drives social distance from and public animosity toward refugees (Cowling, Anderson, & Ferguson, 2019; Hartley & Pedersen, 2015; von Hermanni & Neumann, 2019; Koc & Anderson, 2018; Schweitzer, Perkoulidis, Krome, Ludlow, & Ryan, 2005). Broadly, these findings are similar to the earlier findings that natives may associate im-migrants with threats to public safety (Cannetti- Nisim, Ariely, & Halerpin, 2008; Fitzgerald, Curtis, & Corliss, 2012; Mclaren & Johnson, 2007) and prefer ethnically or culturally proximate immigrants in general (Coenders & Scheepers, 2003; Hainmueller & Hangartner, 2013; Newman & Malhotra, 2019; Sniderman, Hagendoorn, & Prior, 2004; Wright & Bloemraad, 2012).
Whether it is economic, cultural, or security, these findings are consistent in that natives oppose admitting refugees when they perceive them as threatening outgroups. Natives may view economic and humanitarian migrants as threatening for the same reasons. Furthermore, a list of various threats may explain why people reject immigrants’ entry, but it does not explain why they often approve of admitting refugees in the first place. One answer to this question resides in a disjuncture between the literature on refugee politics and the growing number of studies on the public attitudes towards refugees: a humanitarian logic.
Few studies have identified or articulated the humanitarian logic that policymakers and the pub-lic may use to justify admitting refugees. Among the few exceptions, Bansak et al. (2016) examines how the public reacts to the humanitarian heuristics by randomly assigning vignette descriptions about hypothetical refugee applicants’ reasons for seeking asylum, testimony consistency, and their particular vulnerabilities. Although the aim of the study was not to examine the difference between the politics of refugee and economic migrant selection, Bansak and colleagues show that natives’ humanitarian concerns have positive impacts on refugee acceptance, which could mitigate the effects of ethno- cultural or economic factors. However, they do not clearly articulate how humanitarian concerns predict native’s preferences on refugee intake. Nor does Bansak and colleagues’ study conceptually disentangle natives’ individual levels of humanitarian sentiment from heuristics used to assess refugees’ vulnerability. Hence, their study does not explore how individuals with different lev-els of humanitarianism respond to such heuristics. Considering that waves of humanitarian migrants can trigger major policy shifts among receiving countries, this is a major gap in the political science literature on immigration. Building on previous studies, our article fills this gap by developing and empirically testing a theory of humanitarian deservingness that explains public attitudes toward ref-ugee admission.
4 Fraser and Murakami
Developing a Theory of Humanitarian Deservingness
Hosting refugees is driven to a large extent by humanitarian concerns. Unlike other forms of migration, refugee protection is a norm codified into international and domestic law. Hence some studies have considered the role of humanitarianism in shaping public attitudes towards immigrants (Newman, Hartman, Lown, & Feldman, 2013), but most others implicitly assume that natives weigh the economic benefits against the social and redistributive costs of hosting immigrants. As the litera-ture review in the previous section suggests, many studies explain the public opposition to immigra-tion by various types of threats. While the socioeconomic calculus makes sense when considering the selection of economic migrants, it cannot explain why the public often supports the refugee admission. We start from the premise that people distinguish between admitting immigrants for eco-nomic reasons and admitting them for humanitarian reasons. Accordingly, our argument theorizes that humanitarianism plays a key role in explaining public support for admitting refugees.
Our theory posits that natives’ support for refugee admission depends on the degree to which refugees are considered vulnerable persons deserving of protection. Recognizing that threats and financial costs matter, we argue that natives will most strongly support refugee admission when they view specific refugee populations as unthreatening and in need of protection. Strictly speaking, our study shows that the logic of humanitarianism operates rather independently from natives’ propen-sity to oppose immigration based on perceived threats. Humanitarians are motivated to help those who are genuinely in need and use the deservingness heuristic to help them discern who should re-ceive help, while threat perceivers are motivated to exclude groups associated with threats. Although threat perception and humanitarianism are competing impulses with different triggers, we show that they commonly operate in parallel within the same individual. In other words, we argue that natives, especially those with high levels of humanitarianism, support the admission of refugees in need of protection despite the presence of threats.
Threat perceivers tend to exclude immigrants because they think that admitting immigrants would create risks for the host country. Rooted in economic and cultural anxieties, threat perception of immigrants is a key driver of public opposition to immigration (Mayda, 2008; Sides & Citrin, 2007; Sniderman et al., 2004). Natives often see immigrants as an unwelcome source of competition for economic opportunities (Dancygier & Donnelly, 2014) or as a threat to the established social dominance of ethno- cultural majority groups (Bobo & Hutchings, 1996; Hainmueller & Hangartner, 2013; Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961/1988). Furthermore, natives may also see immi-grants as a threat to their domestic security (Benček & Strasheim, 2016; Fouka, 2019; Kalicki, 2019). Building on these studies, we argue that natives oppose refugee admission when they see refugees as culturally distant and as a security threat (i.e., links to terrorism or states that have a history of conflict with the host country).
Despite the perceived threats of hosting immigrants, we argue that natives who hold humanitarian values would still be likely to support refugee admission. This is because the humanitarian logic has no clear, direct relationship with the logic of threat perception: Humanitarians can perceive greater or lesser threats, and threat perceivers can be inclined to help those in need or not. We recognize that threat perception may undermine humanitarians’ propensity to help migrants fleeing dangerous sit-uations. But it is an empirical question as to whether threat perception hinders natives’ humanitarian sentiment and whether such perceptions suppress the humanitarians’ propensity to help refugees.
We predict that natives who strongly hold humanitarian values are most likely to support ad-mitting refugees. Humanitarianism is defined here as the “belief that people have responsibilities towards their fellow human being and should come to the assistance of others in need” (Feldman & Steenbergen, 2001, p. 659). Humanitarians are likely to support refugee admission because they are prone to feel sympathetic toward others’ suffering from dangerous situations and as a result feel com-pelled to extend aid or support. Past studies report that this value orientation influences the support
5Role of Humanitarianism
for welfare (Blekesaune & Quadagno, 2003; Feldman & Steenbergen, 2001) and that this effect is modified by the recipient category, or perceived deservingness of social benefits (Petersen, Slothuus, Stubager, & Togeby, 2011). On immigrant selection, some studies imply that natives’ humanitarian-ism influences their support for admitting immigrants fleeing persecution (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; Newman et al., 2013).
Our theory distinguishes humanitarianism from deservingness in the following manner: Humanitarianism operates as one’s value or belief, while deservingness functions as a heuristic used by humanitarians to judge who genuinely needs their assistance. Deservingness can be defined as judging an individual or group’s circumstances based on their actions and their ability to control their situation (Feather, 1999, p. 88). For example, humanitarians would be more likely to view an indi-vidual as deserving of financial assistance for hospital bills when (s)he is injured by accident because the person in question is viewed as suffering from a random event and is therefore not responsible for their injuries. By contrast, humanitarians may be less inclined to view this individual as deserving of financial assistance, if his or her own use of illicit drugs resulted in medical treatment. This is because, in this second scenario, said individual is viewed as directly responsible for their own injuries. In this manner, humanitarians rely on the deservingness heuristic to provide help to those who suffer from the negative effects of circumstances beyond their control. As with humanitarianism, deservingness is rooted in human psychology and can influence policy preferences. Several studies use the deserving-ness heuristic to explain the public support for redistribution (Jensen & Petersen, 2017; van Oorschot, 2000, 2006; Petersen, 2012), and others show that the deservingness heuristic influences decisions about providing assistance regardless of cultural background, values, or political beliefs (Petersen, 2012; Petersen et al., 2011; Petersen, Sznycer, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2012). Importantly, Hansen (2019) finds that individuals with higher levels of humanitarianism rely more on the deservingness heuristic to help them distinguish between those who genuinely need assistance from those who do not. She suggests that like humanitarianism, the deservingness heuristic is based on emotions and allows for lower- level information processing. Hence, the deservingness heuristic allows humanitarians to avoid the risk of being taken advantage of by those who do not need assistance (Hansen, 2019).
Figure 1 displays the causal logic of our humanitarian deservingness theory. Plus or minus signs on each arrow represent positive or negative relationships between two concepts. The right side of this figure shows that we expect threat perception to negatively impact public support for the ad-mission of refugees and economic migrants. Independent of these effects, the left side of this figure visualizes how our theory predicts three nuanced positive effects. First, the thick positive arrow from humanitarianism to support for refugee admission denotes the disproportionately positive impact that individuals’ level of humanitarianism has on their views toward refugee admission. By contrast, the thin positive arrow from humanitarianism to support for admitting economic migrants represents a positive but comparatively less significant relationship between the two. Second, the positive arrow
Figure 1. A theoretical model of humanitarian deservingness.
6 Fraser and Murakami
from deservingness to refugee admission represents natives’ conditional support of refugee admis-sion based on cues used to discern whether refugees deserve protection. Third and importantly, this positive effect of deservingness is moderated by individuals’ level of humanitarianism. This moder-ation is captured by the positive arrow from humanitarianism to the arrow stemming from deserv-ingness to support for refugee admission. In sum, we argue that dispositional and situational triggers related to humanitarianism shape public attitudes towards refugees. We predict that when natives are predisposed to help others in need (humanitarianism) and/or refugees are seen to be victims of randomly occurring events, the public is more likely to support refugee admission.
Research Strategy
Following the theoretical discussions above, we make two predictions. First, refugees’ place of origin should inform natives about the level of threat. As mentioned above, natives are prone to oppose hosting refugees who would be an ethno- cultural minority in the host country and who have links to rival states. Second, we expect that natives oppose admitting refugees from rival states, because they view admitting citizens of rival states as a security threat. In a similar manner, the public expenditure associated with hosting refugees should inform natives about the economic costs. This should also lead natives to oppose refugee admission when they believe it will create an economic or fiscal burden.
Second, independent of these predictions, the events that caused migration should inform na-tives about the degree to which refugees are deemed to be in need of protection (deservingness). As mentioned above, we predict that humanitarians will use this deservingness heuristic to determine whether to admit refugees. Therefore, individuals with a higher level of humanitarianism should deem refugees deserving of protection when the refugees seem vulnerable to events for which they have no discernable responsibility. More specifically, when refugees flee randomly occurring and dangerous events unrelated to their individual actions (natural disasters, ongoing military conflicts), we expect that humanitarians see them as more deserving of refugee protection, and therefore they support refu-gee admission the most. In comparison, when refugees are fleeing situations which they seem to have played a role in or for which they might be responsible (expressions of political dissent), we expect that humanitarians would be hesitant to admit them. This is because despite their vulnerability, the refugees’ culpability is more ambiguous, especially when they are to be admitted as a group.
Importantly, our theory assumes that humanitarians should have a low propensity to accept eco-nomic migrants because foreign workers are not seeking protection, and their decision to immigrate to the host country should be considered as voluntary rather than coerced. This prediction is import-ant, because we propose that the influence of humanitarianism is independent from that of perceived threats. The logic of threat perception holds that natives support admitting economic migrants more than the refugees fleeing military conflicts or political repression, if the latter group poses national security threats. But even if the migration- triggering event functions as the deservingness heuristic for humanitarians, we would still observe that humanitarians support the admission of refugees more than they support the admission of economic migrants. In sum, threat perception and humanitarian-ism function as distinct psychological triggers that influence public support for refugee admission.
Japan as a Test Case
We test our theory of humanitarian deservingness in Japan because this case has a comparative advantage relative to other countries that have recently experienced a large- scale refugee intake. Because prior experiences hosting refugees can harden public attitudes toward refugees (Hangartner et al., 2019), we opt to test our theory using a case where the measurement of humanitarianism and the perception of events are less likely to be influenced by prior experiences with refugees. Prior ex-periences with refugees may also change humanitarian values in people’s minds: When people think
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about the different reasons for migration or when their level of humanitarianism is measured, their prior experiences with refugees can change the response they give. If a key independent variable (hu-manitarianism) is influenced by prior experiences which also correlate with the dependent variable (attitudes on refugee policy), then the analysis would suffer from endogeneity. As we describe below, Japan lacks such experiences, and thus, we can minimize this problem.
Among wealthy democracies, Japan’s immigration policy stands out as one of the most restric-tive (Akashi, 2014). Its strict immigration policy has often been explained by the bureaucratic domi-nance of the conservative Ministry of Justice, along with the conservative preferences of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in power for most of the time after 1955 (Akashi, 2014; Tsuda & Cornelius, 2004). Japan’s reluctance to host refugees lies within the same domain of this restrictive immigration policies: The Japanese government provided very limited assistance to refugees in terms of volume, continuity, and stability (Hitomi, 2018), and its focus has been more on control rather than protection of refugees (Asakawa, 2013). First, Japan has admitted very few refugees as compared with North America and Europe. In 2017, it admitted only 20 asylum seekers, which is less than 1% of the total number of applications for that year (UNHCR, 2019), the lowest recognition rate among wealthy democracies. The total number (stock) of refugees that the Japanese government has admit-ted for 40 years between 1978 and 2019 is only 12,307 (Ministry of Justice, 2020). Second, major political parties have rarely discussed or articulated their positions on refugee policy (Akashi, 2014). This does not mean, however, that Japan has never faced refugee politics in the past. Japan accepted a relatively large number of Indochinese refugees between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and a diplomatic scandal focused international media attention on Japan’s strict refugee policy during the early 2000s referred to as the Shenyang incident. Yet, Japanese policymakers tried their best to min-imize the political impact of these events and have rarely made refugee policy a high priority (Dean & Nagashima, 2007; Flowers, 2009; Strausz, 2012). Soon after the Shenyang incident in 2002, the Japanese government modified its policy to accommodate the refugees with more transparency, but their revisions of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 2004 and 2005 did not challenge the existing institutional framework of strictly controlling refugees’ entry to and residence in Japan (Asakawa, 2013).
Within this context, we presume that few Japanese people know, have seen, or interacted with refugees (inexperience) and that even fewer consider forced migration as a major political issue or recognize political parties’ stance on refugee policy. Given the low political salience of refugee pol-icy in Japan, it is reasonable to expect that Japanese people would not consider refugee issues when answering questions measuring the level of humanitarianism. At the same time, the low salience of and general lack of knowledge about refugees may even lead the Japanese citizens to conflate eco-nomic migrants with refugees. If this is the case, we should observe little difference in the structure of natives’ attitudes towards economic migrants and refugees. Accordingly, the Japanese context provides us with a useful test case to examine whether natives respond differently to economic and humanitarian migrants.
Data and Methods
We conducted an online survey, “Studies on political cognition and voting in elections” be-tween February 21 and March 1, 2019. We asked Nikkei Research Inc., a major survey company, to recruit eligible Japanese aged between 18 and 79 from its own and associated panels, who voluntarily enrolled themselves for membership on the Internet (convenience sample). Overall, 2953 eligible Japanese voters completed this study (the completion rate to the number of recruited panels was 3.8%). While lower response rates as we had in this study are typical of recent web surveys, participants in our study may overrepresent some population with specific characteristics by self- selection, most likely those who are interested in politics. Upon recruitment, the company
8 Fraser and Murakami
weighted their samples by age, gender, and prefecture. Although our samples slightly underrep-resent teenagers and those over 70, and overrepresent those who live in Tokyo prefecture, the participants roughly approximated the distribution of the voters in Japan. Because so- called “sat-isficers” threaten the internal validity of our study (Berinsky, Margolis, & Sances, 2013; Miura & Kobayashi, 2016), the responses of participants who could not pass two simple screening questions were removed from the analysis. This results in 2457 individuals with valid responses.
This survey has two components, a nonexperimental part and a conjoint experiment. Before participants saw our conjoint experiment, they answered a series of questions about Japanese society and politics as well as participated in two other experiments unrelated to our study (voting in a mock election). In the earliest part of this survey, they answered questions designed to measure the level of humanitarianism, one by a translated version of Katz and Hass’s Humanitarian- Egalitarianism (H- E) scale (Katz & Hass, 1988; Japanese translations by Taka, 2015), and another by Feldman and Steenbergen (2001). Katz and Hass’s H- E scale includes 10 items such as “One should be kind to all people” and “There should be equality for everyone— Because we are all human being.” Feldman and Steenbergen’s scale includes eight items such as “It is better not to be too kind to people, because kindness will only be abused” and “The dignity and welfare of people should be the most important concern in any society.” In both scales, three items are commonly used: “One should always find ways to help others less fortunate than oneself,” “A person should always be concerned about the well- being of theirs,” and “Those who are unable to provide for their basic needs should be helped by others.” To see a full list of these items, see Appendix S1 in the online supporting information.
We found that all ten items in Katz and Hass’s H- E scale loaded on a single latent factor (RMSEA = .07 and CFI = .92 in a one factor model), whereas the eight items in Feldman and Steenbergen’s scale did not (RMSEA = .14 and CFI = .70). Accordingly, a single scale to measure individuals’ level of humanitarianism was constructed using Katz and Hass’s ten items and standard-ized to range from 0 (least) to 1 (most humanitarian). Hereafter we use and refer to this measurement as a humanitarianism scale. About 90% of the participants are within the range of .4 and .8 on this score. For details, see Appendix S1 in the online supporting information.
In the middle of our survey, participants answered a few questions measuring their immigration policy preferences. First, they answered a question about immigration, “the number of foreigners [or immigrants, randomly assigned] who come to settle in Japan should be increased or reduced” on a 5- point scale. Immediately following this, they were asked if Japan should “accept or not accept foreigners who come to Japan for the following purposes,” and we listed refugees, short- term, and long- term workers. Participants answered for each item on a 5- point scale. To compare the effect of humanitarianism on natives’ attitudes towards different type of immigrants, these four questions serve as our dependent variables in our analysis of nonexperimental component.
Then in our conjoint experiment, participants were asked to imagine a specific situation where the Japanese government is planning to accept immigrants to Japan. They were asked to rate the stated government’s policy. Immediately following this, all the participants read another vignette and rated the government policy again (two rounds). In each round, they read a short vignette:
Imagine that [1. a major earthquake occurred, which displaced large numbers of people in [2. a foreign country]] this year. Because of this, Japanese government is considering a plan to receive people from [2. the country], and there is a plan to house them in each prefecture in proportion of immigrants matched to local population. [3. Migrants will be expected to find their own housing.] [4. The LDP leadership and the prominent LDP Diet Members have publicly endorsed this plan.]
In this vignette, we randomly assigned four attributes as indicated with square brackets above: (1) events that caused migration; (2) immigrants’ origin; (3) provision of public housing; and (4) the
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level of LDP endorsement. The unweighted assignment of different levels in each attribute is inde-pendent of one another. These attributes do not rotate for a participant in his or her two rounds: Given a specific combination of four attributes in the first round, no particular combination was assumed in the second round. In other words, attributes were randomly assigned fully independently for each round. Thus, the total number of vignette scenarios is 4 × 5 × 5 × 4 = 400 patterns, and all possible 400 combinations of four attributes appeared in the data. The details of attributes are summarized in Table 1.
These attributes reflect different theoretical perspectives that explain people’s preferences on immigrant intake: immigrants’ place of origin as a cue for potential cultural and/or security threat; public housing representing economic or welfare costs; and LDP endorsement as a cue for partisan politics. Our primary focus is on the nature of migration- triggering events. It distinguishes between economic and humanitarian migrants and allows us to capture the randomness of the events that cause refugees to flee. First, a domestic labor shortage is an event that specifically leads states to recruit economic migrants, while the other three events represent crises that create forced or hu-manitarian migration. Second, an earthquake can be perceived as a random event beyond refugees’ control. By contrast, protests that trigger state repression are least likely to be considered random, because people may see refugees as culpable due to their ability to choose between engaging in or avoiding such events. A civil war is considered less random than a natural disaster because refugees may be perceived as being involved in the conflict as combatants, but more random than protests.
After participants read this vignette, two questions followed: (1) how many refugees Japan should admit and (2) whether participants agree or disagree with the government’s policy to admit them. The participants answered the first question on a 7- point scale from accepting “none” to “more than 100,000 of those people,” and the second question on a 5- point scale from “agree” to “disagree.”
Table 1. Attributes Randomly Assigned in a Vignette
Attribute Level (wordings in the vignette)
Event A a major earthquake occurred, which displaced large numbers of people in
B the local government sent troops in to put down large protests, which displaced large num-
bers of people in
C a civil war broke out, which displaced large numbers of people in
D domestic labor shortages became serious, which could hurt economic growth in [Japan]Origin A A foreign country
B Mainland China
C Hong Kong
D Tibet
E TaiwanPublic housing A Those people will be expected to find their own housing
B Those people will be provided with public housing for one month
C Those people will be provided with public housing for three to six months
D Those people will be provided with public housing for six to 12 months
E Those people will be provided with public housing for an indefinite period of timeLDP endorsement A (No information)
B The LDP leadership and prominent LDP Diet Members have publicly endorsed this plan
C The LDP leadership endorsed this plan, but prominent LDP Diet Members have remained
silent on it
D The LDP leadership endorsed this plan, but prominent LDP Diet Members publicly criti-
cized it
Note. For each attribute, one level (A, B, C, D, or E) randomly appears in the vignette that participants read. A sample text is shown in the main text. In the domestic labor shortage scenario (D) in the event attribute, “Japan” appears right after the text for the event, regardless of the chosen origin of immigrants. “No information” (A) in the LDP endorsement attribute means that no text appears on that attribute part.
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We asked the number question first, because it is a straightforward measurement of the participants’ preferred level of immigrant admission without priming the government performance or partisan-ship. After answering the second question, participants repeated the same task again— they read a new vignette with a different combination of attributes and answered the same two questions. This produced a total of 4914 observations.
The two questions above were designed to measure the same concept of policy preferences on the hypothetical immigration admission. Accordingly, participants’ answers are highly correlated (Pearson’s r = .64 across individuals in either round and altogether in two rounds), and thus a stan-dardized average score of immigration preference was constructed (hereafter immigrant admission preference). The immigrant admission preference ranges from 0 (disagree with admitting any mi-grants) to 1 (positive to admit migrants in a highest volume), and “I don’t know” and refusals were excluded. This means that the answer of “should accept none of these people” in the first question and “disagree” with the government policy to accept migrants in the second question were rescaled to 0, whereas the answer of “should accept more than 100,000” in the first question and “agree” with the government policy in the second question were rescaled to .5 respectively, and the two scores were added. This serves as our dependent variable in our analysis of the experiment component.
The descriptive statistics of the dependent variables in both nonexperimental and experimental components are presented in Table 2. Note that all the measures are rescaled so that 0 represents the most restrictive attitudes towards immigrant admission, and 1 represents the most lenient attitudes.
Hypothesis
Our core hypotheses are threefold. Because our first conjecture is that the logic of accepting eco-nomic and humanitarian migrants is different, we should first examine if people apply their human-itarianism more to refugees than to economic migrants. Thus, in the nonexperimental component,
H1- 1: The impact (coefficient) of the humanitarianism scale is much larger on the refugee ad-mission than on short- term or long- term foreign- worker admission or the admission of “immi-grants” in general.
And in the conjoint experiment also, we expect that the influence of humanitarianism is ob-served even at the presence of the threat’s heuristic. Accordingly,
Table 2. Descriptive Statistics of the Dependent Variables
Note For the exact question wordings and answer options, see Appendix S2 in the online supporting information.
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H1- 2: The impact (coefficient) of the humanitarianism scale on immigrant admission preference are larger when the events produce refugees (earthquake, civil war, and protest) than when the event produces economic migrants (domestic labor shortage).
Second, our theory of humanitarian deservingness posits that the more random the event that produces human suffering, the more natives perceive those affected to be deserving of unconditional help. As we discussed in the previous section, we operationalized the randomness by type of events: Earthquake is the most random, civil war the next, and the protest is the least. Thus, if this logic holds on average,
H2: Participants in our survey support the admission of refugees fleeing an earthquake the most, those fleeing a civil war less, and those fleeing the repression of a protest the least.
But some participants may perceive this different nature of events as different types of threats. To further examine our theory of humanitarian deservingness, we extend the logic to the individual difference in humanitarianism. If humanitarians are predisposed to help others in genuine need, then they should be the most likely to apply a logic of deservingness based on the perceived randomness of events. Thus, the effect of the events should be pronounced among those ranked higher on the humanitarianism scale. In other words, the difference in effect described in the second hypothesis comes mainly from the more humanitarian individuals. This moderation should be observed even after controlling for the threat perceivers’ potential different responses to three types of refugees. Accordingly,
H3: Effects of events on immigrant admission preferences are moderated by the level of human-itarianism in a way that the people on the higher range are more influenced by the different na-ture of events (earthquake the most, civil war the next, and protest is the least defensible cause). These moderated effects should be observed even after controlling for the moderated effects of events by participants’ racism (a proxy for the cultural threat) and security preferences (security threat).
We also examine two other hypotheses related to the threat perception. First, the perceived threat theory predicts that Japanese people would support the admission of immigrants from Taiwan more than immigrants from the mainland China because of the difference in their perceived threats to the national security. Second, the socioeconomic cost argument expects that people support the admis-sion of immigrants more when the immigrants do not need government assistance (expected to find their own housing) than when they are substantially supported by the government (public housing for a longer period of time).
To ease the estimates of the treatment and moderated effects, we applied OLS to regress re-spective dependent variables. Because the nature of the dependent variables in the nonexperimental component is ordinal scale, we also examined our data with ordered logit models. The interpre-tation of the results remained the same. Thus, the results shown below are of the OLS models for the ease of interpretations of the coefficients. Different statistical models were constructed for the nonexperimental and experimental components. For the nonexperimental component, we included the humanitarianism scale and other control variables in each model— participants’ gender, age, education, residence in major cities, employment status, racism scale, trust in the government party (Liberal Democratic Party), cabinet approval, and policy preferences on spending, size of the gov-ernment, security preference, and diplomatic relations with East Asian countries. Exactly the same set of independent variables were included for different dependent variables (refugees and economic migrants). For the experimental component, the estimates for the first two hypotheses (H1- 2 and H2)
12 Fraser and Murakami
are based on models with the humanitarianism scale and dummy variables for each level of attributes without any control variables. Even when the same control variables described above were included in this model for the experimental component, the results did not substantively change (for details, see Appendix S3 in the online supporting information). The estimates for the third hypothesis (H3) includes three interaction terms between event dummies and (1) the humanitarianism scale, (2) the racism scale, and (3) security preference to control for the effect of threat perception.
Analysis
The results of the analysis of our first hypothesis (H1) is summarized in Figure 2, which com-pares the coefficients of the humanitarianism scale in five different models. Due to both space limita-tions and our primary interest (the difference in coefficients), all the regression tables are omitted in the main text, but they are available in Appendix S4 in the online supporting information.
The left panel in Figure 2 compares the coefficients of the humanitarianism scale on respective dependent variables in the nonexperimental component. We first notice that all the coefficients are positive and distinguishable from zero (p < .01 for all). Despite the difference in their type, this means that the more humanitarian people are, the more immigrants they prefer to admit to Japan. The strengths of this correlation, however, are different across types of immigrants. The coefficient for refugees (b = .48, SE = .04) is much larger than those for economic migrants (b = .22, SE = .04
Figure 2. Coefficients of humanitarianism scale, compared. The estimates on the left panel are based on four separate OLS models in which humanitarianism is introduced with other control variables (nonexperimental component), and the estimates on the right panel are based on a single OLS model in which three interaction terms of humanitarianism and event dummies are included. Whiskers at the top show the result of the Wald tests of equivalence on relevant pairs of coefficients of the humanitarianism scale. Their statistical significance is noted by ***p < .01, **p < .05, *p < .1, and “ns” meaning not significant (p > .1).
13Role of Humanitarianism
for short- term and b = .21, SE = .04 for long- term workers) or “immigrants” in general (b = .18, SE = .04). Three Wald tests of coefficient equivalence rejected a null hypothesis that the coefficient for refugees is the same as the other three coefficients (for each, p < .01). Because the wording of answer options for the independent and dependent variables included in each model is the same, these results suggest that people weight humanitarian considerations more when they are asked about refugees than when they are asked about economic migrants or “immigrants” generally.
The right panel of Figure 2 confirms this interpretation. It compares the estimated marginal ef-fects of humanitarianism for different events in the vignette on the immigrant admission preference in our conjoint experiment. They are coefficients of the humanitarianism scale when this variable is interacted with three event dummies. Again, we can observe larger coefficients for the events that caused refugees than for the event that pulls economic migrants, but with some limitations. The coef-ficient is significantly larger for the earthquake (b = .57, SE = .09) or civil war (b = .52, SE = .07) than that for labor shortage (b = .31, SE = .08), but the coefficient for the protest (b = .40, SE = .08) is not. Wald tests of difference suggest that coefficients are significantly distinguishable only for two events (the earthquake against labor shortage, F(1, 1822) = 5.36, p = .02, and the civil war against labor shortage, F = 3.99, p = .05. The Wald test for the protest against labor shortage was F = .71, p = .40). All in all, we confirm Hypothesis 1- 1 and a part of Hypothesis 1- 2. In general, people are guided by humanitarian concerns more when they are asked about refugee intake than when asked about economic migrant intake. In our experiment, we find people are guided by humanitarian concerns more for some specific refugee- producing events (earthquake and civil war) than for filling domestic labor shortages. In the next section, we test our theory of humanitarian deservingness, focusing on the different effects of attributes of the experimental component.
Experimental Component
The average treatment effects of immigrant attributes on immigrant admission preference in our experimental component are presented in Figure 3. The right side of the figure shows estimated aver-age marginal component effects (AMCE), and the left side shows marginal means (MM, see Clayton, Ferwerda, & Horiuchi, 2021; Hainmueller, Hopkins, & Yamamoto, 2014; Leeper, Hobolt, & Tilley, 2020). An overview of this figure suggests that events and origins have significant impact on the participants’ preference, while the provision of public housing and the LDP endorsement do not. It is noteworthy that our economic cost stimulus did not change their preferences. The third panels from the top show that they support the admission slightly less when participants were told that the public housing was to be provided indefinitely for them. This effect is relatively small, when compared to the baseline of no public housing (b = −.02, SE = .02, p = .11). Much greater deviation is observed in the origin attributes (the second panels from the top). Compared to when immigrants’ origin was presented as a “foreign country,” immigrants from Mainland China were less preferred (M = .34, b = −.08, SE = .02, p < .01), and immigrants from Taiwan (M = .51, b = .09, SE = .01, p < .01) were more preferred. Different place of origin seems to signal a different level of threat to the participants, resulting in the largest impact on the immigration admission preference.
Turning to the nature of events, the top two panels of Figure 3 suggest that participants pre-ferred immigrant/refugee admission the most, when an earthquake produced immigration (marginal M = .47), followed by civil war (M = .43), labor shortage (M = .41), and protest (M = .39). We should note that the absolute level of admission preference between labor shortage and protest is statistically indistinguishable (diff = .01, p = .41), even though the former category could pose more security threats. On the other hand, compared to the civil war as a base category, refugees fleeing earthquake is more preferred (b = .04, SE = .01, p < .01), and refugees fleeing protest is less preferred (b = −.03, SE = .04, p = .02). This suggests that despite the effects of perceived threats, people differentiate ref-ugees based on the nature of events when considering their admission. This fits well with our theory
14 Fraser and Murakami
of humanitarian deservingness: People are more likely to provide unconditional help to refugees es-caping from randomly occurring events (earthquake or civil war) compared to refugees fleeing some events in which they may have played a role in (protest). Thus, Hypothesis 2 is supported.
Below we further explore the implication of our theory of humanitarian deservingness by testing our third hypotheses. Following the logic that humanitarians are more sensitive to the deservingness of help for those in genuinely need, we expect that the effects of the refugee- producing events are stronger among the individuals with higher level of humanitarianism, even after controlling for the effects of the perceived threats. Thus, the interaction terms between events and humanitarianism scale, those between events and racism, and those between events and security policy preferences are all included in the model to predict admission preferences. By doing so, we can examine if humani-tarians use the event information as a deserving heuristic after taking account of the threat perceivers’
Figure 3. AMCEs and marginal means of attributes on immigrant admission. All the panels are based on the same nonparametric model in which only attribute variables are used.
15Role of Humanitarianism
(high level of racism scale and those who prefer a hawkish and defensive security policy) different responses to the events.
The moderated effects of events by humanitarianism are visualized in Figure 4. In this model, we set the protest as the base category so that the estimates represent the effects of the earthquake or civil war relative to the protest. The figure clearly suggests that the effects are better observed at the higher range of humanitarianism: The more humanitarian individuals are, the larger the effect size of the earthquake or civil war is on their immigrant admission preference. For example, those with the score of .8 on the humanitarianism scale (at the 90th percentile point) prefer refugees fleeing the earthquake more than refugees fleeing protest by about .08 points (SE = .02, p < .01). For the civil war, this difference is about .06 (SE = .02, p = .01). Conversely, the difference of events has no impact among those on the lower score of humanitarianism scale. Accordingly, they suggest that humanitari-ans distinguish the nature of events in considering the refugee entries, which supports Hypothesis 3.
Concluding Discussion
Despite advances in the literature on public attitudes toward immigration, it is common to con-ceptualize immigrants as foreign workers. Existing studies predict that natives support immigration for economic reasons but oppose it when they view immigrants as threatening. However, extant theories do not sufficiently explain public support for refugee admission. Collectively, refugees may impose significant socioeconomic costs making them far less attractive than high- skilled foreign workers. Despite such potential costs, states admit refugees primarily for humanitarian reasons.
Figure 4. Effects of events on immigrant admission moderated by humanitarianism. The estimates are based on the same OLS model in which three interaction terms of humanitarianism and event dummies, as well as six interaction terms of racism and event dummies, security preference and event dummies are included. See Appendix S4 in the online supporting information for this detail.
16 Fraser and Murakami
Hence, there is a compelling case for scholars to identify the precise ways in which humanitarianism generates public support for hosting refugees.
With the aim of addressing this gap, our article introduces a theory of humanitarian deserving-ness. Our theory predicts the public support for refugee admission is based on the degree to which natives view refugees as nonthreatening, vulnerable persons deserving of protection. This study presents an original research design that may be modified to test in any national context. We can expect that the humanitarian deservingness transcends the Japanese case because humanitarianism and deservingness are universal— both have been shown to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we have shown that humanitarians are more likely to support admitting refugees who flee randomly occurring crises such as natural disasters or armed conflict that may impact noncombatants. We have also shown that this propensity is observed even when the heuristic for the potential security threats is present. In sum, this article has illustrated why and how natives support the refugee admission based on a humanitarian logic.
Concerning policy implications, policymakers seeking to admit refugees in large groups may want to focus on those who are least likely to be culpable for the situations they are escaping. Receiving states often use discretionary executive power to grant refugee status to individual asylum seekers fleeing repressive regimes because of their political beliefs or activities, often with little public scrutiny. Conversely, resettling large groups of refugees at one time requires a certain degree of public support. We concede that in many situations, it is probably unrealistic for governments to completely nullify natives’ propensity to view humanitarian migrants as threatening. However, our findings suggest that building public support for admitting large groups of refugees depends to some degree on the perceived randomness of crisis events that cause people to flee. Thus, our findings imply that governments build public support for refugee admission, or at least reduce public opposi-tion, by emphasizing the degree to which refugees are victims of circumstances beyond their control. The choice of many western governments to prioritize sponsoring families as well as women and children over younger or combat- age men in their response to the Syrian refugee crisis exemplifies this point.
This study is not without limitations. First, some of our findings were based on observational data, correlation between individuals’ humanitarianism, and immigrant admission preference. Even though the key information in our vignette was exogenously assigned, this limits our capacity to make a causal claim about these two attitudes. Second, the main gap in our analysis is that we do not test the link between key mediating variables: the deservingness of refugees and the randomness of refugee- producing crisis events. This has implications for the internal validity of our study: People may not actually consider the randomness of the refugee- producing event in rating refugees’ de-servingness. One alternative logic may be participants’ interpretation of the physical damage caused by the event in question (perceived harm). Indeed, Japan has a long history of experiencing large earthquakes that destroy public infrastructure while protests occur less frequently as compared to other developed countries. Hence, it is possible that participants judged the deservingness of refu-gees using a different logic. Ultimately, this alternative interpretation does not contradict our theory of humanitarian deservingness: In fact, it largely supports our argument, if the degree of perceived damage increases the perceived deservingness of refugee protection.
Another possibility is that respondents’ policy preferences could be based on presuming that refugees fleeing certain types of events may not require permanent resettlement. For instance, re-spondents may have thought that earthquakes created temporary refugees who would eventually leave Japan while they considered civil wars and acts of political repression as ongoing events that created a long- term, or perhaps permanent, refugees. This second alternative interpretation of our findings cannot, however, account for the other two pieces of evidence we have reported: First, participants with higher levels of humanitarianism were most likely to distinguish between events, and second, access to public housing was largely insignificant in explaining participants’ attitudes
17Role of Humanitarianism
to refugee admission. If participants (including humanitarians) were more engaged in making such a calculation, then they should have been more sensitive to the duration of time refugees would be given public housing.
There are two main theoretical implications of our study. First, our findings suggest that we should reevaluate, if not move beyond, theories that rely on catchall concepts of “immigrants.” We believe this leads to a broader question of how we should conceptualize the phenomena we study. Furthermore, as research on public attitudes toward immigration proliferate, it is increasingly im-portant to move beyond theoretical approaches that focus on economic migrants. Public opinion makes up an important component of a larger set of political dynamics that can vary depending on the identity of and way in which immigrants entered the host country. But as our study shows, na-tives make a clear distinction between economic migrants and refugees— so too, should theories that predict public support for immigration.
Another implication is the importance of clearly defining and measuring humanitarianism. To date, no studies that seek to explain public attitudes toward refugees have offered a clear definition of humanitarianism. Rather, existing studies have operationalized humanitarianism as an individual refugee’s age, gender, family structure, and type of physical or mental harm suffered, all represented in vignette treatments (Alrababa’h et al., 2021; Bansak et al., 2016). We agree that these attributes matter, but it is important for future studies to clearly define humanitarianism and to measure the individuals’ predispositions directly. Doing so should avoid concept stretching and help refining the arguments about humanitarian support for immigration.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, JP15K16994. We thank all the thoughtful com-ments by all the reviewers and editors. We also appreciate Rohan Alexander, Ben Allen Stevens, Zain Asaf, Randy Besco, Sophie Borwein, Michael Donnelly, Jonah Goldberg, Takumi Shibaike, Blake Lee- Whiting, Peter Loewen, John McAndrews, Eric Merkley, Catherine Moez, Kevin Wei Luo, and all the participants in the NEWJP conference at the Dartmouth College (August 26- 27, 2019), especially Kentaro Fukumoto, Yusaku Horiuchi, Risa Kitagawa and Megumi Naoi for their helpful comments on the earlier version. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Go Murakami, College of Law, Ritsumeikan University, 431 Shugakukan, 56- 1 Tojiin kitamachi, Kita- ku, Kyoto 603- 8577, Japan. E- mail: [email protected]
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Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article at the publish-er’s web site:Appendix S1. The Humanitarianism Scale
Table S1.1. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Humanitarianism Scale (a Single Factor Model)
Figure S1.1. Distribution of the humanitarianism scale.
Appendix S2. Dependent Variables
Figure S2.1. Distributions of dependent variables.
Figure S2.2. Distribution of and relationship between participants’ admission preferences in the experimental component.
Appendix S3. Control Variables
Table S3.1. Distribution of Control Variables used in the Models in the Non- Experimental Component.
Table S3.2. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Modern Racism Scale (a Single Factor Model)
Figure S3.1. Coefficients of humanitarianism scale.
Figure S3.2. Difference in effects of attributes on immigrant admission between two models (with and without controls).
