Identity or interests? Religious conservatives’ attitudes toward Syrian refugees in Turkey

Abstract

The literature on religion and migration attitudes shows that religious concerns may play a significant role in motivating anti-migrant sentiments. Most of these studies, however, focus on Western countries, where religious beliefs and symbols have been utilized to amplify the cultural differences between natives and newcomers. In this article, we contribute to this scholarship by examining religious conservatives’ attitudes toward Syrian refugees in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country where political elites have employed religiously informed narratives to mitigate hostility toward migrants. To do so, we use a sequential mixed methods design, whereby nine focus group discussions conducted with religious conservatives in Istanbul in November 2019 were complemented by an original survey of Istanbul residents fielded in July–August 2020. Our results indicate that religious motives have a bias-reducing effect on conservative Sunni Muslims’ attitudes toward Syrian refugees; however, such motives are not powerful enough to overcome personal economic concerns. More broadly, the results suggest that researchers should be cautious about generalizing findings from Western societies to non-Western contexts and pay greater attention to the ways in which cultural and economic factors may interact in shaping natives’ migration preferences.