Norms, not just interests: public support for migrant rights protections in Europe–Africa cooperation on irregular migration

This article analyses public support for stronger migrant rights protections in migration policy cooperation agreements between European and African countries. We theorise and explore how individuals’ preferences for stronger migrant rights protections in migration policy cooperation agreements vary with their perceived interests and broader normative commitments. Our empirical analysis draws on data collected from novel conjoint survey experiments that we conducted with quota-representative samples of the adult population in six European countries (the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden) and four African countries (Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia). We find a significant public preference across European and African countries for enhanced migrant rights protections, suggesting a strong and widespread norm in favour of migrant rights that holds across all the subgroups that we analyze. Our results also suggest that individuals’ perceived interests and broader normative commitments matter for the strength of their support for migrant rights, and they also influence their preferences for who, i.e., the respondent’s own country or the ‘other’ cooperation country, should provide the protection. We find only limited and partial evidence that including migrant rights protections increases individuals’ support for more restrictive elements of migration policy cooperation.