Elite Rhetoric and Public Attitudes Toward Refugee Policy

Abstract

US immigration and refugee resettlement policy, and discourse surrounding immigration policy more broadly, have undergone a fundamental shift toward securitization. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how elite framing shifts public attitudes towards restrictive refugee policies, and it consists of 3 experimental chapters and an exploratory survey of resettled refugees. Experiment 1 theorizes that public disagreement regarding immigration is driven by political communication and framing, rather than by genuine policy disagreement. I find that, in the absence of framing, respondent attitudes coalesce toward moderate support for a restrictive refugee policy but that security frames fracture respondents’ attitudes along partisan lines. Experiment 2 gauges the impact of characterizations of refugees on public opinion toward restrictive refugee policies and employs a unique sample of Muslim and Christian Americans. I find that support for a refugee ban decreases when refugees are described as “Muslim,” indicating resistance to explicit religious cues. Furthermore, this effect appears to be driven by the Muslims respondents in this survey so there is suggestive evidence of an ingroup bias toward Muslim. Experiment 3 extends my research on how characterizations of refugees influence attitudes toward restrictive refugee policies and the potential moderating impact of partisan identity on the reception of framing. I find a significant impact of both sympathetic and threatening characterizations of refugees and that these effects are strongest among self-identified Republicans. I also present an Exploratory Survey which addresses resettled refugees’ experiences and attitudes. This survey explores the perceptions of linked fate, assimilationist or multicultural attitudes, political efficacy, and attitudes toward refugee and immigration policy among this hard-to-reach group.