A new study by researchers at Dartmouth College finds that Americans are more likely to support refugee resettlement nationally than in their own locales. This attitude was consistent across demographic profiles, ideologies, and geography. It also did not correspond with characteristics of the participants’ immediate environments—so factors like population density, unemployment, or concentration of refugees in the county did not seem to matter.
In other words, the idea of refugee resettlement appears to be well and good in abstract. But like in the case of housing for low-income black and brown people, even liberals may take on a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitude when it is closer to home. [...]
The second part of the experiment gauged how the media narratives influenced attitudes towards refugees. The findings here were pretty grim: The negative news stories had a more powerful effect on depressing overall support for resettlement than the positive ones had in boosting it. “Our results provide clear evidence that pro-resettlement advocates may be wise to focus their appeals on other considerations (for example, humanitarianism) rather than directly attempting to refute security arguments,” the authors write in the paper. A slim silver lining: proximity to refugees tended to blunt the effect of negative news. So folks who actually had refugee neighbors were less likely to perceive refugees as threats. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that contact with someone of a different race or gender, even just for ten minutes, can reduce prejudice. Trump voters, for example, didn’t live near any Mexican immigrants. It also explains why residential segregation within cities is such an important factor in fueling misperceptions about communities of color.
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