Migration & Forced Displacement

How do policymakers respond to forcibly displaced people, and how do migration policies shape where people move and the consequences of their flight? This agenda advances and tests a theory of displacement policymaking in the Global South, emphasizing cross-border kinship, civil war, and local integration capacity.

Global displacement policy. More than 85% of the world’s forcibly displaced people originate and reside in the Global South, yet most empirical migration scholarship focuses on wealthy democracies. A central contribution of this agenda is the Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies (DWRAP), covering 54 de jure provisions in every country from 1951 to 2022. With Guy Grossman and Jeremy M. Weinstein, I show that intense civil wars in neighboring countries are the primary impetus for displacement policy reform: by shifting expectations of inflows, regional wars raise the salience of forced displacement, and states liberalize when political elites have co-ethnics facing discrimination abroad, because asylum policy can provide relief to non-citizen kin and ease their integration (IO 2022). Challenging the presumption that de jure policies are inconsequential in the developing world, we also show that more liberal policies attract forced migrants: knowledge of destination policies diffuses through transnational ethnic kin, and provisions supporting free movement, services, and employment are especially attractive (APSR 2022). Evidence from gravity, synthetic control, and interrupted time-series models is corroborated by interviews with 100 displaced people and 26 humanitarian and government officials. Notably, the Global South has been gradually liberalizing asylum policy even as policy in the OECD grows more restrictive.

Climate migration. Recent climatic disasters have uprooted millions of people, and public support will be key to integrating climate migrants in host communities. With Sabrina B. Arias, I use a conjoint experiment embedded in nationally representative surveys of 2,160 respondents in the United States and Germany to show that climate migrants occupy an intermediate position in the public view — garnering more support than economic migrants but less than refugees — underscoring the role of humanitarian considerations and empathy in shaping migration attitudes; a follow-up factorial experiment finds no evidence that priming climate migration increases support for climate mitigation (JOP 2022). Leveraging Hurricane Ian’s landfall during the fielding of a representative U.S. survey in autumn 2022, we also show that disaster exposure increases concern about climate migration, support for policies to address it, and belief in anthropogenic climate change — effects that cross-cut partisanship, education, and age, but decay within six months (APSR 2024).

Refugee repatriation. How does refugee return affect conflict in communities of origin? In work with David van Dijcke and Austin L. Wright (conditionally accepted at the American Economic Review), I estimate the causal effect of a large cash-assistance program for refugee returnees on conflict in Afghanistan, finding cross-cutting effects: policy-induced return reduced insurgent violence but increased social conflict. I discuss this work further under Conflict.