How Private Refugee Sponsorship Impacts Sponsors and Their Friends
About the Project
The number of refugees is at an all-time high and will likely continue to increase (UNHCR 2019). In response, many countries are struggling to find ways to both integrate recent refugees and generate public support for welcoming additional refugees. Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program offers an atypical way to address both issues. Despite the practical importance and potential of the PSR program, we have relatively few evaluations of its effects. This project will cover a project where I examine the causal effects of sponsorship on sponsors and people in their social networks. The results of this research will inform a subsequent phase of work that will evaluate the effects of the PSR program on refugees and the neighbourhoods where they eventually live.
In this project I will evaluate the impact of sponsorship on sponsors and people in their social networks using a research design that offers credible causal identification. Immigration, Refugees, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (IRCC) is interested in the results of this project and has agreed to work with me on it for free. We will field a survey of people who have signed up to be private sponsors of refugees. I will be able to compare people who are soon to be sponsors (control group) against those who have recently sponsored (treatment group). Both groups of people should be similar aside from the experience of actually working with a refugee in the settlement process, and so comparisons across the two groups will reveal the causal effects of this process on the outcomes of interest. I will solicit contact information of sponsor’s friends during the survey of sponsors and then I will run a similar survey on their friends. In this second survey, I will again have a group that is friends with the control group and another group that is friends with the treatment group.
This project is practically important. Canada has been running a PSR program for decades yet has not studied what sponsoring does to sponsors or to the people in their social networks. It is important to know how sponsoring affects attitudes towards refugees and Canadian refugee policy. It is also important to know how one’s attitudes towards refugees change when a friend sponsors, as this can shed light on the mechanisms producing or mitigating against anti-refugee sentiment.
This project is also theoretically important, as I can use it to test implications drawn from theories relating volunteering and health (Harlow & Cantor 1996; Lum & Lightfoot 2005; Morrow-Howell et al 2003; Van Willigen 2000), trust (Paxton 2007; Stolle 1998), future volunteering (Flanagan et al 1998), or other pro-social behaviours. For example, it would be worthwhile to know if sponsoring changes one’s generalized trust or degree of pro-social tendencies. It would also be worthwhile to know if sponsoring changes similar attitudes in one’s friends, perhaps creating positive feedback loops. Past investigations of these questions were typically plagued by selection bias—the people who volunteer are probably not like the people who do not volunteer—and so it is hard to know if differences between volunteers and non-volunteers are due to selection into volunteering or the causal effect of volunteering. My research design minimizes such concerns and allows for cleaner tests of many theories linking refugee contact or volunteering to trust in institutions, life satisfaction, pro-social behaviours, and voting intentions, among others.