Open AccessWhat Drives Migration to Europe? Survey Experimental Evidence from Lebanon
Author(s) -
Anselm Hager
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the international migration review/international migration review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.109
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1747-7379
pISSN - 0197-9183
DOI - 10.1177/0197918320988662
Subject(s) - refugee , human migration , syrian refugees , openness to experience , demographic economics , mass migration , poverty , empirical evidence , migration studies , vignette , push and pull , european union , sample (material) , development economics , political science , geography , population , economic growth , sociology , psychology , immigration , economics , social psychology , demography , international economics , gender studies , philosophy , law , chemistry , engineering , epistemology , chromatography , mechanical engineering
What drives people to migrate? Amid a stark increase in international migration at the global scale, we lack individual-level evidence that causally adjudicates between migration’s many drivers. We implement a survey experiment in Northern Lebanon—a hotbed of international migration—to a random sample of 1,000 Syrian refugees and 1,000 Lebanese residents. Respondents were shown the profile of a hypothetical Syrian refugee and asked whether they recommended that the refugee migrate to the European Union. The vignette randomly primed five prominent causes of migration, including push factors (political instability and poverty) and pull factors (open borders, employment opportunities, and cultural openness). We find that pull factors outweighed push factors, suggesting that migrants carefully weigh their chances in Europe. Still, all five primes yielded positive effect sizes, which underlines that prominent theories of migration are complements, not substitutes. Taken together, the evidence suggests that empirical models of migration can be improved if they take into consideration both pull and push factors, rather than prioritizing one over the other.