Left Out: How Political Ideology Affects Support for Migrants in Colombia
Do perceived political views of migrants affect their treatment? For existing studies of migrant reception largely conducted in the Global North, the overlap between ethnicity and partisanship has made it difficult to disentangle political fears from other status and identity concerns. We leverage a case in which migrants come from a similar ethno-linguistic background to explore the role of political fears. Drawing on an original face-to-face survey with over 1,000 Colombians and 1,600 Venezuelans in Colombia, we find that Colombians view Venezuelan migrants as left-wing even though actual Venezuelan migrants are more right-wing than their Colombian hosts. These political misperceptions are consequential: we find that Colombians strongly oppose the settlement of left-wing migrants in their communities. Our research implies that societies can construct out-groups along political lines when the ethnic and cultural bases for migrant exclusion are weaker.