Public support for international cooperation on irregular migration : can reciprocity mitigate asymmetric national interests?

Migration cooperation agreements aimed at reducing irregular migration between lower- and higher-income countries have become a highly salient and divisive issue in foreign policy and international affairs, yet we know relatively little about how citizens think about such policies. In particular, we don’t yet know how different types of reciprocity, increasingly demanded by policy elites in high income countries to encourage greater cooperation of lower-income countries, shape public support for such agreements. To address this gap, we analyze public preferences for migration policy cooperation between European and African countries. More specifically, we ask and theorize 1) how policy features that generate public support for, and opposition to, migration cooperation agreements vary across countries and sides of the cooperation agreement; and 2) whether reciprocity can mitigate differences in national interests and foster greater consensus in public policy preferences across migrant destinations in Europe and origin/transit countries in Africa. Our empirical analysis is based on a novel conjoint survey experiment with 15,104 respondents across four African countries (Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia) and six European countries (the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden). We find that Europeans strongly favour cooperation agreements that include forced and/or voluntary return policies alongside a preference for more high-skilled work permits. In contrast, Africans tend to oppose forced returns and instead favour increased work permits across both high and low-skill levels. However, both groups favour new measures to protect migrant rights and prefer European financial assistance for poverty reduction and employment creation in African countries. We find no evidence of reciprocity playing a strong role in shaping average public preferences for cooperation and only tentative evidence of reciprocity effects among a small number of sub-groups.