Deservingness in context: perspectives toward refugees and asylum seekers in Canada

What drives the evaluations of extending protections and services to refugees and asylum seekers? In dialogue with research on attitudes towards refugees, in particular, work pointing to the importance of deservingness cues for refugee evaluation, this article explores the conditions under which Canadians are willing to provide the right to stay and access to migrant-specific services to refugees and asylum seekers in Canada. Taking into consideration the institutional and policy specificities of Canada’s immigration regime, our analysis suggests that refugees and asylum seekers are evaluated as qualitatively different groups by the Canadian public. Consequently, we propose that economic cues and deservingness cues should have different influences on the evaluation of these two groups. Using a survey experiment, this article finds that economic cues play a role in the evaluation of refugees and that humanitarian needs are central to Canadians’ evaluation of asylum seekers. These results demonstrate the need to take national and institutional contexts into account when considering attitudes towards vulnerable migrant groups and, in particular, deservingness evaluations of these groups.