Who Wants Which Venezuelans, and Why? Conjoint Evidence from Colombia and Peru

• In Event: Public Policy Attitudes

Abstract

Despite long-standing interest in migration attitudes in high-income destination countries, less work examines their forms in low- and middle-income settings that host many forcibly displaced people. This limits theory development and empirical understanding, while neglecting the possibility that the drivers of attitudes in these contexts may substantially differ from received explanations in North American and Europe. Addressing this problem matters because migration—and public perceptions of migrants—continues to animate broader political shifts in receiving countries that threaten democratic norms, institutions, and practices. Therefore, having a better understanding of who wants which migrants and why is central to addressing larger concerns about democratic backsliding, especially in low- and middle-income settings.

In response, we present evidence from two pre-registered online conjoint survey experiments fielded in Colombia and Peru (total N=5,433) that measured attitudes about the admissibility, perceived economic impacts, and perceived security threats presented by hypothetical Venezuelans whose characteristics we randomly varied. Our choices of cases and migrant population matter because these countries host the majority of displaced Venezuelans in Latin America and the Caribbean who themselves now comprise the world's largest displaced population.

We present two sets of empirical results. First, in the aggregate, we find some consonance with evidence from high-income countries, notably around which features matter for admissibility and economic perceptions, but also important divergences regarding security perceptions and the limited salience of ethnicity. Second, using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) applied to the data, we identify how these attitudes coalesce around particular clusters of respondents. This methodological step, common to economics and public health studies yet not yet having been applied to conjoint designs about migration attitudes, provides richer detail about how attitudes towards Venezuelans fall along specific sociodemographic and political lines. This adds richness beyond standard approaches that aim to identify heterogeneity in attitudes using discrete—and often binarized—moderators (e.g. by gender, or other measured variables of interest). Finally, we explain both sets of findings by setting them in the context of Colombian and Peruvian responses to large-scale Venezuelan migration, including growing xenophobia in the region, as well as Latin American migration policymaking more broadly. This has implications for correcting existing theorization that originates from high-income countries’ experiences, as well as generating new theories of migration public opinion from one of the world’s most highly-impacted areas.

Authors

• William Allen, University of Oxford

• Isabel Ruiz, University of Oxford