When making asylum decisions, is it worse to deny protection to someone who needs it or to grant it to someone who does not? Cornelius Wright Cappelen, Hakan G. Sicakkan and Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem present evidence from 26 countries showing how citizens weigh up this dilemma.
Asylum decisions inevitably involve a difficult moral and institutional dilemma: the risk of denying protection to someone who needs it versus the risk of granting it to someone who does not. In a new study, we examine how the public views these errors and what this tells us about support for asylum systems.
We use original survey data from 26 countries and more than 27,000 respondents. We find that public opinion on this issue is more nuanced and more structured than one would assume. Importantly, these views help explain broader patterns of support or resistance to asylum policy.
A three-way split in public opinion
Political debates on asylum policy frequently frame the issue as a zero-sum game where humanitarian goals clash with state sovereignty. But behind that familiar opposition lies a more fundamental dilemma: should the system err on the side of caution when there is doubt, and if so, what kind of caution?
This question boils down to a trade-off between two types of error. A false negative occurs when a person who is genuinely in need of protection is wrongly denied asylum. A false positive means granting asylum to someone who does not meet the legal criteria. In an ideal world, both types of errors would be eliminated, but in practice, imperfect information, high caseloads and political constraints make these errors all too likely.
We asked respondents to choose which type of error they viewed as more serious, under the assumption that asylum criteria are appropriately strict, but that decision-makers sometimes lack perfect information. Their options ranged from “false negatives are clearly worse” to “false positives are clearly worse”, with the possibility to say both are equally serious. The results are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: People’s attitudes to mistakes in asylum decisions
Note: For more information, see the authors’ accompanying study.
Rather than a clear divide between restrictionist and humanitarian attitudes, we found a three-way division. Nearly 40% of respondents believed that both types of errors are equally serious. Roughly 37% prioritised avoiding false negatives, while around 24% prioritised avoiding false positives, focusing on the risks of granting protection to the undeserving.
This distribution held across most of the 26 countries in our sample, with some variation in magnitude. In a handful of Central and Eastern European countries, concern for false positives was more prevalent. Elsewhere, the dominant tendency was to prioritise humanitarian caution.
What explains these differences?
These preferences are not random. Attitudes toward false positives and false negatives are strongly associated with broader political values and beliefs, particularly those relevant to immigration and welfare.
The clearest predictor of public concern for false positives is welfare chauvinism, i.e. the belief that access to welfare benefits should be reserved for native citizens. Respondents who held stronger welfare chauvinist views were significantly more likely to prioritise avoiding false positives, seeing them as an unfair strain on public resources.
Other political attitudes also shaped these preferences. People who placed themselves on the right of the political spectrum, who expressed nativist views or who endorsed exclusive conceptions of citizenship were more likely to view false positives as the greater threat. Conversely, respondents who supported more inclusive citizenship norms and favoured admitting more asylum seekers tended to prioritise the avoidance of false negatives.
Interestingly, we found that differences between countries in attitudes toward false positives and false negatives were not primarily driven by national economic conditions, asylum caseloads or migration levels. Instead, they largely reflected the distribution of individual-level values within each country, especially welfare chauvinism and nativism.
This finding challenges common assumptions that attitudes toward asylum reflect material pressures on scarce resources. Instead, values and identity politics appear to play a far greater role in shaping how citizens view fairness in asylum decision-making.
Policy implications – accuracy matters
Our findings have direct implications for policymakers and advocates involved in the design and communication of asylum systems. The fact that more people view false negatives (wrongly rejecting someone who needs protection) as the most serious error in comparison with false positives suggests that, in the face of uncertainty, large segments of the public support humanitarian caution, placing greater normative weight on the risk of failing those in need of protection.
Our results also suggest that citizens do not treat asylum decisions as just another bureaucratic process. They see these decisions as morally weighty, with life-and-death implications. This moral framing may explain why many people resist simplistic solutions and prefer systems that are both rigorous and humane.
Public opinion on asylum is often treated as a binary opposition between pro- and anti-immigration preferences. Our study challenges this view. It shows that citizens hold complex, morally engaged views about fairness in asylum decisions, and that these views are structured by identifiable political attitudes. Understanding how people think about mistakes in asylum decision-making can help policymakers design systems that not only meet legal obligations but also foster the legitimacy of the international protection regime.
For more information, see the authors’ new study in International Migration Review.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Ajdin Kamber provided by Shutterstock.
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