Interactions between migrant race and social status in predicting acceptance of climate migrants in Norway

Abstract

An emerging stream of research documents that climate migrants are more acceptable than economic migrants to citizens in high-income countries. However, extant research has not considered migrant race, and how race, along with socioeconomic status, interact with reasons for migrating to impact the perceptions of acceptability among residents in the receiving society. We investigated the joint effects of reason for migration (economic vs. climate), race (Black vs. White), and socioeconomic status (low vs. high) on migrant acceptability judgments among a national sample of Norwegian residents (N = 1637) using a preregistered survey experiment. The results indicate that climate migrants are more acceptable to participants than economic migrants, and White migrants are preferred to Black migrants. There was also an interaction between reason for migrating, race, and social status whereby Black, low social status, and economic migrants were less accepted than any other migrant profile. Especially notable was the finding that Black climate migrants of low socioeconomic status were seen by participants as being much more acceptable than Black economic migrants of low socioeconomic status. The notion that climate and economic migrants can be meaningfully differentiated in the real world is debatable. Nonetheless, our study suggests that framing migrants’ motivation in terms of environmental influences, compared with economic motivations, has potentially major effects on migrant acceptance in receiving societies.