Student Seminar: How do racialization processes shape US attitudes towards climate refugees?

Speaker: Michael Middleton
Affiliation: UCDavis

Abstract :

Growing displacement and migration due to climate change has led to a rise in recent studies that explore the acceptance of climate migrants in new host countries. These studies have consistently found that residents in Western countries accept nonwhite migrants at virtually the same level as White migrants. Missing from these studies is an engagement with racism in its modern form, which is often more “color-blind” rather than overtly expressed and thus can be more difficult to capture. With this in mind, I ask the following questions: 1) What role do racialization processes play in attitudes toward migrants who move for political, climate, and economic reasons? and 2) Does this effect vary across different questions of acceptance? To answer these questions, this study utilizes Duboisian insight from the sociology of race to argue that, while White attitudes towards the acceptance of nonwhite migrants may be positive in the abstract, when Whites are forced to give up their symbolic and material power in the process, this positive reception wanes. The study utilizes a conjoint design experimental online survey to test the acceptance of migrants applying for refugee status across multiple outcomes: 1) legal acceptance, which measures the acceptance across the physical border; and 2) symbolic acceptance, which measures the acceptance into American society. These findings replicate prior research in finding no significant difference between the legal acceptance of White and nonwhite migrants among White respondents. However, when the acceptance outcome becomes symbolic, this parity dissipates. This study contributes to the literature by adding a symbolic layer to migrant acceptance in the United States, an important distinction in the era of “color-blind” racism. It also extends this insight to the climate migrant context, one that has been underexplored to-date.