Having shown that, on average, German citizens are relatively open towards climate change migrants, it would be interesting to know under which circumstances and according to which principles they would be willing to accept them. A second framing experiment randomly asked respondents to express their agreement with three arguments for accepting climate change migrants: (1) a moral obligation to help people in distress in general; (2) an obligation to help climate change refugees in proportion to one’s country capacities (population size, GDP, past number of accepted migrants); and (3) an obligation to help climate change refugees in proportion to one’s country’s greenhouse emissions (environmental responsibility that leads to climate change).
According to the first and most general argument, Western states have to help, as they have a moral obligation to support people in distress in general (Wyman 2013: 190–193). Climate change migrants, like refugees, constitute vulnerable persons. And as long as the help comes at little cost, states have an obligation to accept such people (Wyman 2017: 354–356). Inhabitants from islands that will soon disappear due to rising sea levels can clearly be considered people in urgent need. Likewise, these populations are very small, and thus the costs for receiving states are relatively small. Most climate change migrants, however, are affected by deteriorating agricultural conditions. As already discussed, it might be difficult to distinguish them from economic migrants. At the same time, these migrants would constitute a much bigger burden to share among industrialized nations.
According to the second principle, support should be proportional to one’s country’s capacities regarding population size, economic situation, and past number of accepted migrants. Large states that have the financial means and a relatively small migrant population should accept more migrants than others. According to Bansak et al. (2017), this principle of proportional equality should receive wide support as it constitutes one of the most fundamental principles of burden sharing that is also applied as a principle of distributive justice.
While the principles of general moral obligation and proportional equality concern immigration questions in general, there is a third principle that is particularly relevant to the debate on climate change migrants: corrective justice (Wyman 2013). It is widely agreed that emissions in industrialized states are the main cause of climate change, which at present affects developing countries more than developed countries. Almost 90% of the participants in the survey agreed that the effect of human beings’ behavior on climate change is very or rather strong, which in turn strongly affects the environment. According to Byravan and Rajan (2010), the problem is not so much that industrialized states emit greenhouse gases but that they emit so much more per capita than developing countries and at the same time also benefit disproportionately from these developments. It can thus be argued that Western societies have a special obligation to accommodate climate change migrants.
Against the corrective justice principle, it might be argued that current citizens of a country are not responsible for harms caused in the past, that earlier emitters might not have known the consequences of their behavior, and that it is in general difficult to relate a country’s emissions to migration flows of specific groups, especially given the complexity of migration patterns (Wyman 2017: 353).
In any case, whether or not one agrees with any of these arguments might depend on whether or not this would indeed lead to substantial increases in migration. As Germany is a rich and attractive industrial country, it might potentially be confronted with a high number of climate change migrants. The question is thus whether there might be a trade-off between moral principles and a sense of corrective justice, on the one hand, and very blatant self-interests regarding the costs of immigration, on the other hand. Even those who defend the principle that vulnerable people need to be assisted, irrespective of the reason for that vulnerability, argue that this can be done as long as a country can bear the costs (Rawls 1971).
To test whether or not cost-related arguments affect the respondents’ willingness to accept climate change migrants, the survey sought to elicit participants’ self-interest by providing arguments for the potential number of climate change migrants (Bansak et al. 2017). While there seems to be a broad agreement that climate change has an important direct or indirect impact on migration flows, studies continue to debate whether or not these migrants move to Western countries. It has, for example, been shown that climate change leads first and foremost to internal migration and urbanization (Beine and Parsons 2015).
To test which justifications make the acceptance of climate change migrants more likely, participants were asked to indicate their agreement with various statements on reasons to accept climate change migrants. Each participant received one vignette, and they were as follows (randomizing the parts in italics; for balance tests see Table 4 in Appendix):
In the near future, more and more people will be forced to leave their home countries due to deteriorating environmental conditions such as floods and droughts that some say are caused by climate change. Various researchers anticipate that a relatively small/high number of these migrants migrate to industrialized countries such as Germany as most of them migrate to neighboring countries/as their neighboring countries have similar problems.
Some people argue that industrialized countries like Germany have to help these people as they have a moral obligation to help people in distress in general/as these countries contributed significantly to causing climate change through their greenhouse gas emissions. This support should be proportional to their environmental responsibility that leads to climate change/as they have the financial means to do so. This support should be proportional to a country’s capacity in relation to financial means, size of the country, and past migration acceptance rates.
Graph 3 displays the marginal means of how much people agree on a scale from 1 (fully no) to 4 (fully yes) with the three arguments, as well as the average agreement values across all three treatment groups when participants were told that climate migration flows will be relatively low or relatively high (see Table 1 in the Appendix for question wording). We see that people become more tolerant when they hear arguments related to capacity instead of morality or corrective justice. The difference, however, is not statistically significant, as indicated in Table 7 in the Appendix. Agreement rates are also higher when a low number of migrants can be expected. This difference is statistically significant.
It should be considered that patterns might vary between subgroups. It is possible, for example, that the corrective justice argument plays a more important role for highly educated people and environmentalists, as they feel more obligation and as this principle might be seen as part of universal liberal norms. Graph 4 displays the same subgroups as Graph 2 (see also Table 7 in Appendix). Two patterns can be observed: people who do not differentiate at all between the different arguments as well as the information provided and those who do. Low-educated people and environmentalists have relatively low and high agreement rates, respectively. Low-educated people have a higher likelihood to be intolerant, and it appears that none of the arguments leads them to rethink their opinions. Environmentalists can be expected to have generally positive feelings towards migrants, as ecological attitudes and tolerance can be explained by similar factors such as postmaterialism and political liberalism, and this is the case irrespective of the arguments provided. These high agreement rates might also be due to their overall sensitivity to environmental and thus climate change issues.
Contrary to low-educated people and environmentalists, highly educated people and non-environmentalists were convinced more by the capacity arguments than the other two groups and also reacted differently to the information about low and high migration numbers. In both cases, the difference between high and low numbers is statistically significant. The difference between the capacity and the other two arguments is statistically significant in the case of non-environmentalists but falls short of statistical significance in the case of highly educated respondents (see Table 7 in the Appendix).