Learning to Trust Refugees: Border Security and Attitude Extremity

• In Event: Political Identities, Contemporary Issues, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Primary concerns regarding refugees stem from their entry procedures, especially their background checks and vetting. After all, many countries heavily invest in fortifying borders and enhancing border bureaucracy. If natives learn that refugees were vetted well, they sho uld trust them more. We conduct a survey experiment in the United States to examine this hypothesis using several empirical strategies, like open-ended responses for border security beliefs and trust games for interpersonal trust measurement. Additionally, our emphasis shifts from average attitudes to extremity in attitudes, which we capture through quantile regression.

Authors

• Tobias Heinrich, University of Houston

• Yoshiharu Kobayashi, Rice University

• Elizabeth Connors, University of South Carolina