Do People Like Refugees More than Economic Immigrants?

A simple question that our best research still hasn't settled

Compassion alone rarely tips the scale.

Some folks here¹ have recently highlighted a fascinating study by

Laurenz Guenther

documenting that mainstream politicians in Europe are generally much more pro-immigration than their voters. This representation gap has often been filled by rising right-wing populists, a point I and others have made for a long time. The straightforward implication is that mainstream parties should probably better represent voters’ views. But even setting aside the debate about the effectiveness of accommodating populism, what does it mean to represent people’s often skeptical views on immigration in practice?

As

Jerusalem Demsas

aptly notes in her piece grappling with this issue, it is much more complicated than just reducing the overall immigrant numbers—we need to take into account the nuances of what people actually want. There’s broad agreement, for instance, that voters dislike illegal immigration, and growing agreement that they like high-skilled immigration. But if you ask whether humanitarian migration is more popular than “regular” economic migration, smart people suddenly split.

When I post on any adjacent topics, non-experts say “of course, refugees and asylum seekers are unpopular,” while some of my colleagues with PhDs insist the opposite. One recent research paper even cites the idea that people “tend to express more positive sentiments toward refugees than toward immigrants” as if it were settled conventional wisdom. Despite years of research and hundreds of issue polls and academic papers on immigration, it turns out observers still bitterly disagree on a seemingly simple question: Is humanitarian immigration popular among voters? This is unfortunate, since it prevents willing policymakers from filling those representation gaps in an evidence-based way.

So what is going on? Below I offer the best articulation and evidence for either position. Theoretically, there are straightforward reasons humanitarian migration could be more popular than economic migration: it speaks to voters’ sense of moral duty and empathy by helping those in need. But it could also be less popular since few voters are committed cosmopolitans, empathic appeals are short-lived, and the costs here appear before benefits, with security and fraud worries looming larger. Put simply, humanitarian migration can win on compassion, while economic migration can win on practicality and control.

All things considered, I think the intuitive view—that humanitarian immigration is unpopular, especially when it can’t be controlled—is more right than not. My fellow academics arguing that admitting refugees is actually popular do have a point under a certain reading of the question, but they tend to overthink things a bit. While I can’t know what motivates any particular author, I do worry that the idea of popular refugee immigration may be an overly optimistic read among some of my colleagues who are themselves unusually humanitarian.² But if you think I’m missing or misinterpreting some key piece of evidence here, do let me know in the comments.

A few disclaimers and definitions before we begin.

As usual, the humanitarian migration space is complex and global, involving a variety of obscure legal procedures across countries. So, to keep this tractable, I focus on a simple empirically verifiable question: Do voters in rich democracies support liberalizing humanitarian immigration more than economic immigration? This may be interesting regardless of your view on the morality or legality of seeking asylum.

By UNHCR standards, an “asylum seeker” is someone who has fled and is applying for protection but hasn’t been recognized yet, while a “refugee” is someone who has been recognized as having a well-founded fear of persecution. Importantly, asylum approval rates vary widely by country and year and are far from universal.³

The best evidence refugees are (more) popular

Let’s start with the cleanest headline results possible. A comprehensive 2025 Ipsos poll as part of the larger survey series estimates that globally about 67% of people believe that “people should be able to take refuge in other countries, including in my country, to escape from war or persecution.” Although their earlier surveys showed higher numbers (78% in 2022), the support has been consistent over the years. This report doesn’t compare it to other migration types, but 67% is still quite high—and well above 50%.

Drawing on a different 2018 global survey across 18 countries, the Pew Research Center issued a report explicitly titled “People around the world express more support for taking in refugees than immigrants.” The report showed that, with the curious exception of the U.S., people were more supportive of “taking in refugees fleeing violence and war” than of “admitting more or about the same number of immigrants” in general—a 71% vs. 50% split on average.

Using a four-country European survey experiment from 2017, another highly cited academic study found that calling newcomers “refugees” rather than “immigrants” increased favorability across multiple questions. The study concludes that “attitudes towards refugees are generally more positive than attitudes towards immigrants,” plausibly because media and political framing mark refugees as more deserving.

A series of “conjoint” survey experiments across countries points in the same direction. In these choice tasks—a smart technique borrowed from marketing—respondents put themselves in the shoes of immigration officers and choose between two or more immigrant profiles with multiple randomized characteristics for admission. Across designs that all neatly allow comparing relative effects of various factors, profiles signaling forced flight from vulnerability clearly tend to beat those signaling a voluntary search for better economic opportunities.

In Germany during 2015–2016, a study titled “Refugees Unwelcome?” found higher acceptance for profiles framed as escaping persecution, alongside evidence that acceptance of refugees remained high even in the aftermath of the “migration crisis.” A more recent conjoint survey comparing Germany and the United States in 2019 similarly reports that people fleeing persecution of various kinds are more likely to be supported than those seeking economic opportunity (with “climate” refugees fleeing natural disasters in between). Another 2019 U.S. conjoint survey found that Americans were more supportive of immigrants “fleeing persecution and violence” than those “migrating for economic reasons” or “reuniting with family.” Interestingly, this study also found that simply labeling similar applicant profiles as “immigrants” or “refugees” while holding reasons constant doesn’t change support much.

Taken together, the best direct and experimental survey evidence seems to say: most voters may not be willing to increase immigration in general, but they have been sympathetic to the plight of vulnerable foreign populations from abroad, and they still believe these populations should be able to seek protection even in respondents’ own countries. Furthermore, when people are forced to choose between admitting a refugee and a similar economic migrant in a hypothetical but reasonable apples-to-apples comparison, they are more likely to choose the former.

The best evidence refugees are less popular

Some of the major evidence against the motion that humanitarian immigration is popular comes from the exact same studies from above, assuming one is open to their alternative interpretation. First, we may want to revisit the explicit comparisons of refugees and immigrants from above. Despite the headline, what the Pew Research Center survey does is effectively contrast two very distinct questions: support taking in refugees fleeing violence and war (any number thereof without a clearly specified limit) with support for admitting more or the same number of immigrants. Given the additional evidence I discuss below, it is clear to me that had they done a more apples-to-apples comparison and asked their respondents whether they would support admitting more or the same number of refugees, the support would be much lower.

At the same time, the aforementioned refugee/immigrant label experiment, which concluded that refugees were described more positively than immigrants across various questions, did not actually demonstrate this. The average gaps are small and sometimes run the other way. Curiously, the paper includes no figures, but recreating the key results from Table 2 clearly shows that any statistically significant differences that exist are absolutely not substantively meaningful (0.03-0.07 on a 4-point scale):⁴

Visualization of Table 2 from De Coninck (2019). Bars indicate uncertainty (95% CI).

According to many of my colleagues, however, the strongest evidence of the claim that refugees are more popular comes from conjoint experiments that ask people to choose between randomized immigrant profiles. These studies are useful for ranking traits in a head-to-head choice, like between two cans of soda or political candidates, but immigrant profile picking is not the same as setting immigration policy.

An example of a randomized conjoint experiment task from Arias and Blair (2022).

When respondents are forced to choose, they understandably select the more vulnerable person over the less vulnerable one, which says something real about their empathy. But policy asks a different question about how many admissions to make, through which channels, at what pace, and under what constraints. Typical conjoint designs do not offer a “none” option, do not force trade-offs across channels, and do not model capacity, costs, or enforcement. The result is a clean test of who wins one hypothetical slot, not whether voters want to scale that choice to tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

It thus may not be surprising that, when some other researchers did a conjoint experiment of choosing between humanitarian policy packages rather than immigrant profiles, respondents preferred packages with caps, conditions, and enforcement, including hard limits on resettlement and especially on asylum applications. This study, however, did not compare any of these packages with those focused on more economic pathways.

So what happens when we ask people whether they want to increase or decrease a certain category of immigrants? When voters are asked whether to increase or decrease specific streams as simple direct questions, humanitarian categories tend to trail. In Britain, straightforward polls by More in Common place refugees at the bottom with various worker categories much higher.⁵ The recent surveys by the Migration Observatory point to the same conclusion, with “people applying for refugee status (asylum)” being the least popular category of immigrants.

Where surveys separate government resettlement from contentious border asylum, we also see that the former is usually less unpopular. In the United States, public support for having a refugee program is higher than support for allowing people to seek asylum at the southern border. In the United Kingdom, increasing humanitarian resettlement schemes are also more popular than easing routes to claim asylum in the country.

Which leads me to the most looming paradox in the public opinion on immigration. In the same Ipsos World Refugee Day survey that finds 67% saying people fleeing war should be able to seek safety, 62% also say most current refugees are really “economic migrants” (including at least half ot those who agree with the previous question!), and 49% want borders closed to refugees entirely or believe their country has already accepted too many. By contrast, the share that wants to close borders to all immigrants is usually closer to 10 to 20 percent in rich democracies. That points to a specific skepticism toward humanitarian inflows, not migration in general. Another recent study from Germany points the same way, with most people supportive of refugee protections in principle but skeptical of the system in practice.

So, who’s right, and what does that mean?

If the question is “in the abstract, do people voice more sympathy for refugees than immigrants?”, the answer is often yes. Labels and reasons that highlight danger and deservingness tend to lift expressed support, especially when admission looks orderly and bounded.

But if the question is “do voters want to liberalize humanitarian channels more than economic channels?”, the answer is usually no. The closer you get to concrete policy and apples-to-apples comparisons—increase or decrease by stream, explicit caps and conditions—the more people prioritize limits and order, and the more asylum at the border, and even capped resettlement, fares worse than economic pathways.

No matter your personal stance on the right to asylum, it matters what most people think about it. Whatever its legal status—which is unevenly enforced in practice—the crux of the issue is that people, including those who disagree with you, can vote in democracies. And the related representation gaps on immigration we evidently have right now will not close on their own.

When people say they doubt the genuineness of many asylum claims and suspect that many refugees are “economic migrants,” that does not mean they dislike economic immigration. It likely simply means they dislike fraud and loopholes. Telling skeptical voters that applying for asylum is legal will not change minds if they believe it should not be legal in its current form.

Some forms of humanitarian immigration can certainly win majority backing. Community sponsorship programs that let residents resettle people they already know show this is not just an abstraction. Yet support for expanding taxpayer-funded refugee resettlement, and especially for uncapped border asylum, is low in most rich democracies. The only thing that is less popular is straightforward illegal entry without protection claims. Some speculate that resistance to asylum is driven exactly by its close association with irregular immigration, while others conjecture that asylum is thus exactly what makes all other immigration unpopular. But as long as border claims are uncapped and processing capacity is limited, these negative perceptions are unlikely to fade, even with large information campaigns.

In the end, voters remain open to helping the vulnerable, but through routes that are planned and capped. To the extent we see large differences in opinion within the humanitarian migration space, future public opinion work would benefit from testing the favorability of border asylum head-to-head against both government and private resettlement, third-country protection, and targeted refugee aid abroad. Given recurring displacement crises, it is essential to get this right by innovating through policy, so that when the next crisis hits, countries can assist and empower vulnerable populations in a politically sustainable way with minimal backlash.

1. See, for example,

Tyler Cowen

(here) and

Matthew Yglesias

(here) among many other, big and small, accounts.

2. As someone who recently wrote a whole book on the popularity of more lucrative types of immigration, however, I should acknowledge that I may be motivated to weigh the evidence in the other direction. My hope, though, is that my motivation to be accurate about what people actually want, as seen in the data, prevails over anything else.

3. In practice, these distinctions and numbers are also muddied by various in-between categories like U.S. Temporary Protected Status. All these channels are also routinely conflated with “illegal” migration. A lot of ink and resources have gone into explaining these differences, but many people still don’t know them (and it’s probably not reasonable to expect they would anytime soon).

4. To their credit, the authors acknowledge that, for some questions, the immigrant label is more popular than the refugee label. But they do not discuss the fact—absolutely evident from the figure—that whatever differences exist, they are not substantively significant.

5. Notably, foreign lawyers were also not quite popular, though it probably says more about the popularity of lawyers than the popularity of immigrants.