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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Americans preferred Syrian refugees who are female, English-speaking, and Christian on the eve of Donald Trump’s election
Claire L. Adida
1☯, Adeline Lo 2☯*, Melina R. Platas3☯
1 Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States of America,
2 Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America,
3 Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
☯ These authors contributed equally to this work.
* aylo@wisc.edu
Abstract
What types of refugees do Americans prefer for admission into the United States? Scholars have explored the immigrant characteristics that appeal to Americans and the characteristics that Europeans prioritize in asylum-seekers, but we currently do not know which refugee characteristics Americans prefer. We conduct a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of 1800 US adults, manipulating refugee attributes in pairs of Syrian refugee profiles, and ask respondents to rate each refugee’s appeal. Our focus on Syrian refugees in a 2016 survey experiment allows us to speak to the concurrent refugee crisis on the eve of a polarizing election, while also identifying religious discrimination, holding constant the refugee’s national origin. We find that Americans prefer Syrian refugees who are female, high-skilled, English-speaking, and Christian, suggesting they prioritize refugee integration into the U.S. labor and cultural markets. We find that the preference for female refugees is not driven by the desire to exclude Muslim male refugees, casting doubt that American preferences at the time were motivated by security concerns. Finally, we find that anti-Muslim bias in refugee preferences varies in magnitude across key subgroups, though it prevails across all sample demographics.
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Citation: Adida CL, Lo A, Platas MR (2019) Americans preferred Syrian refugees who are female, English-speaking, and Christian on the eve of Donald Trump’s election. PLoS ONE 14(10): e0222504. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222504
Editor: Bryan L. Sykes, University of California-Irvine, UNITED STATES
Received: May 2, 2019
Accepted: September 2, 2019
Published: October 10, 2019
Copyright: © 2019 Adida et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability Statement: All relevant data available in the paper and its Supporting Information files as well as from github at https://github.com/adelinelo/refugee-conjoint.
Funding: This study is funded by an National Science Foundation RAPID Collaborative grant SES-1503802 (www.nsf.gov) and by the University of California, San Diego Academic Senate RP56G (www.ucsd.edu) under author C.A. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction
What types of refugees do Americans prefer to admit into the United States? We know that Americans prefer high-skilled English-speaking immigrants [1], and that Europeans prioritize asylum-seekers with higher employability and greater humanitarian need [2]. We also know that anti-Muslim bias pervades American politics [3] as well as public preferences for immigrants and asylum-seekers [1, 2, 4]. Yet our knowledge of American preferences towards refugees, a particularly vulnerable population, and in a country which until recently accepted the largest number of resettled refugees annually, can be broadened. In light of record-high forced displacement globally, policy changes regarding migration and refugee resettlement under the Trump administration, and the politicization of the admissions process of refugees and
