Rethinking Attitudes Toward Refugee Immigration: The Deservingness-Capacity Framework

Immigration has become an increasingly controversial and politicized issue in European societies, leading to a growing body of scholarly work. Nevertheless, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of general attitudes toward immigration. First, many studies rely on empirical models with only moderate explanatory power. Second, while it is increasingly recognized that attitudes toward refugees differ from general attitudes toward immigration, research in this subfield continues to draw on more general theories.

Building on theoretical work in migration studies and related fields, Tobias Hillenbrand proposes a “Deservingness–Capacity Framework,” which conceptualizes attitudes toward refugees as the combined result of the perceived “deservingness” of refugees and the perceived capacities of the host society, with both factors being subdivided into analytically distinguishable subcomponents. The framework was developed using qualitative data from a large sample of the German population.