Attribution and Migration: A Survey Experiment

Shifting realities in the rules-based order threaten the efcacy of refugee law. Statedirected assaults may weaken legal mechanisms, with the consequence that hosting humanitarian migrants could fall disproportionately on voter support for particular
waves of asylum seekers. Public opinion may then prove more efective than refugee law at providing safe haven. In such a scenario, it is not merely the economic and
integration-related factors that have an oversized impact on public opinion, but also the connection between voters and specifc migration-spurring events. This article investigates how blame attribution impacts attitudes towards asylum seekers. Specifcally, it assesses people’s attitudes towards migrants feeing anthropogenic environmental crises and examines if attributing blame to one’s own country for such crises can alter these attitudes. The article uses data from a pre-registered and well-powered survey experiment run on a quota-representative sample of 1527 Dutch respondents. Evidence from the experiment suggests that environmental disasters caused by the Netherlands spur Dutch respondents to favor migrants feeing that disaster, whereas that efect is not present when an EU entity is responsible. The identifed efects are statistically signifcant but rather small in magnitude. Leveraging
these results, the article discusses whether future EU asylum legislation might be guided by attribution, irrespective of whether political currents reduce treaty-based obligations, and fnally, proposes several avenues for future research.