How welcome are refugees in Europe? A giant study has some answers

Nick Petrić Howe

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast, this time: a measure of the acceptance of refugees in Europe...

Shamini Bundell

...and how to roll a shape down on wiggly paths. I'm Shamini Bundell.

Nick Petrić Howe

And I'm Nick Petrić Howe.

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Nick Petrić Howe

How welcome are refugees in Europe? It's a particularly poignant question right now with the war in Ukraine creating millions of refugees. And this has come shortly after what's known as the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015 to 2016, where around 2 million people were seeking asylum in Europe. And these are both in addition to displacements of people from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea. One answer to this question seems to be that Ukrainian Refugees are welcome in Europe, whereas other refugees may be less so. This is how the situation is often described in the media, although some surveys have suggested that actually the Ukrainian crisis has made people more welcoming of refugees overall. Another answer to the question is that the repeated crises are leading to a reduction in support for refugees in Europe. And there has been a notable rise in support for right wing political parties, who tend to be less welcoming towards refugees. So how welcome are refugees? And why are some seemingly more welcome than others? This week, a paper in Nature attempts to answer these questions. I caught up with Dominik Hangartner one of the authors and asked him how they went about it.

Dominik Hangartner

So, what we've done is that we fielded a large scale survey experiment. And in particular, we used a method which is called conjoint experiment that has been around since the 70s, often used in marketing, where people are shown different types of mobile phones, they differ on different dimensions and attributes. And then people are asked, which one would you buy? And so this survey, designed a survey experiment, we fielded to about 15,000 people across 15 European countries. And so both in terms of the scope of countries and the size of the sample, we have a lot of data to process. And the good thing is that we not only have done this now in early summer 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but we fielded basically the same survey experiment to the same type of respondents in the same countries already in 2016, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. And so what that allowed us to do is also to compare how attitudes have changed over time, and towards particular groups of refugees.

Nick Petrić Howe

And one interesting thing about this survey, that you did, is that you were able to validate it, compare it to people's real-world voting behavior, and it seemed that the surveys match up quite well with that. But in terms of the results, a good starting point is if we go back to the Ukrainian refugees and the current refugee crisis, what were the sort of attributes that people preferred for refugees during this time? And how did that compare to the sort of 2016?

Dominik Hangartner

To answer the second question first, if that's okay, across a wide range of attributes and response, we found a lot of stability in terms of preferences. Meaning, the same type of characteristics that were preferred in 2016, were those that were preferred in 2022.

Nick Petrić Howe

Could you tell me what the sort of idealized refugee was then, in terms of people's attitudes, which was the refugee that people are most accepting of?

Dominik Hangartner

So, for both 2016 and 22, we basically find three main drivers that shape attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees. One is that they prefer refugees that make bigger contributions to the host country economy, refugees that are higher skilled, refugees that are younger, refugees who are more fluent in the host country language. The second thing that we found is that people who are fleeing from war or persecution are preferred over those who seek better economic opportunities. And asylum seekers with more consistent asylum testimonies are referred over those with major gaps. And the last driver that we found is that religion matters, right? Christian and agnostic refugees are preferred over those that are Muslim.

Nick Petrić Howe

And one thing that you didn't mention there, but I'm sure people may be wondering is did you find an effect of race, or ethnicity, here?

Dominik Hangartner

That's a great question. So, what we varied is country of origin, but not race or ethnicity separately, one of the reason is that in many of the places that refugees come from, and these are obviously not the same thing, but it's heavily correlated, right? Interestingly, country of origin, only had fairly small effects on its own. And again, in 2022, we see a slight preference for people from Ukraine over those from other origin country, like Syria or Iraq. But these differences are really small, especially compared to some of the effect of some of these other characteristics, including skill level of the occupation, age or religion.

Nick Petrić Howe

So, there are key things then that seemed to be driving whether or not people are supportive of refugees. But what about the overall support?

Dominik Hangartner

Interestingly, and to my surprise I have to admit, we didn't find any evidence for an erosion of support. So, despite the repeated refugee crisis, 2016 and 2022. Over these years, if anything, support for refugees, the number of asylum seekers people are willing to accept in our large sample, has slightly increased, in actually 14 out of the 15 surveyed countries.

Nick Petrić Howe

I mean, that's interesting, because one of the other things we've seen over the past few years, is a sort of number of political movements that are more say, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee. How do you sort of reconcile what you found here with these movements that have seen an increase in Europe?

Dominik Hangartner

Part of this question goes beyond what we've done in this study, and I don't want to speculate, but we can also subset sample of our respondents, by their general political attitudes if they placed themselves either on the left or to the right of the political spectrum. And not surprisingly, people who are on the right, in general have more skeptical attitudes towards refugees and are less willing to admit larger number of asylum seekers and refugees than people on the left, and we replicate that finding in our study as well. But focusing again, on the changes between 2016 and 2022, we see in general, a slight increase in terms of the number of refugees that people are willing to accept it and that's true for both people on the left and on the right.

Nick Petrić Howe

I guess one thing I wondered as well, is that the surveys that you've conducted have been kind of right in the midst of these crises. Do you think that, you know, say, a year on like we're in now, 2023, after energy prices have increased, that sort of thing, there could be effects here on the general support for refugees?

Dominik Hangartner

At the moment, we cannot rule this out, right, because as you said, you know, we've conducted both surveys, if you will, at the height of the respective quote, unquote, refugee crises, and attitudes might change over time. And if sort of an economically hard time with high inflation, as you mentioned, and other factors maybe not being conducive to a more welcoming environment, these attitudes might change. Having said this, based on additional data that we analysed, I'm a little sceptical if we do see a huge decline. One thing that we've done, not with our data, but with data collected by other researchers, we find similar to our study that these attitudes are very stable over time. So both economic crisis, but also humanitarian emergencies don't seem to have major effects. And if that pattern that was documented for the past also applies to the future, then I wouldn't expect these attitudes to dramatically change between now and if we talk again in a year.

Nick Petrić Howe

Something we hear from readers of Nature, or people who interact with Nature a lot, when we cover this sort of work is that this is a political question. It's not one for science. So I was just wondering what your perspective is on that, and what role do you think science has to play here?

Dominik Hangartner

I understand where this question is coming from. But what we really try to do here is put the science into political science, right? What we document here is patterns of attitudes, and trying to understand the factors that shape those attitudes. That's the science part, right? So what we try to do here is deploy recent advances in survey methodology, to on the one hand, better understand what the public thinks, and also shed some light on the factors that shape their attitudes.

Nick Petrić Howe

And so what do you think then, overall, are the implications for policymakers, people in power, what is the sort of take home message for them?

Dominik Hangartner

While again, there are certain segments of the voter population who do have concerns and voice those concerns. That doesn't seem to be a majority, first. And second, these attitudes do not have worsened over time. So I think, you know, as we've seen in other terms of other political issues, that there might be a loud minority, but that loud minority might not always reflect the views and the preferences of the silent majority. And it seems to me that based on the very large sample across 15 European countries that we collected here, that seems to be going on here as well, that, you know, while of course, the European public has preferences over certain type of refugees, and these preferences are pretty stable over time. We do see in general, relatively high levels of support, and have no indication that this level of support decreased over the last eight years.

Nick Petrić Howe

That was Dominik Hangartner from ETH Zurich, in Switzerland. For more on this story, check out the show notes for a link to the paper.

Shamini Bundell

Coming up, a mathematical method to roll a shape down any kind of route. Right now though, it's time for the research highlights with Dan Fox.

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Dan Fox

The pygmy right whale isn't like some of its larger cousins. It reaches just six and a half meters in length. And now researchers have found another way this miniature whale deviates from the herd. It's feeding grounds. In the Southern Hemisphere, most whales, like the pygmy right — ones with bristly feeder plates called beleens — split their time between ample feeding rounds near Antarctica and the warmer waters further north. To understand the pygmy whales range, researchers examined 14 of these filter feeding plates. The team found that the mixtures of isotopes of nitrogen and carbon, elements that whales only get from their prey, did not match those in the kind of food whales would be able to access near Antarctica. Instead, pygmy right whales probably feast between southern Australia and latitudes further north, suggesting that the animals do not follow the migratory patterns of their larger cousins. The researchers hope that this will help them understand how a changing ocean will affect this little understood species. You can feast on that research in Frontiers in Marine Science.

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Dan Fox

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a probable quasar from the early universe. A quasar is an extremely bright region at the center of a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole. Over a million have been discovered. But just a handful are distant enough to be seen as they were in the early Universe. And so the formation and evolution of early quasars is poorly understood. Researchers analysing images from the telescope spotted what could be an early quasar observed when the universe was less than 700 million years old. The team argue that the object's properties point to it being a quasar rather than other phenomena like a massive clump of stars and hope that the next round of observations will enable a more detailed analysis of the object. You can find that paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

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Nick Petrić Howe

Finally, on the show, it's time for the Briefing Chat, where we discuss a couple of articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing. Shamini, what have you been reading this week?

Shamini Bundell

Reading? Reading? I've been skimping out on the on the homework and doing no reading. Instead, I have spoken to a researcher who's part of a team that's got a paper out in Nature. And I've made a film on it. So, I'll tell you where you can find that at the end. But it's a very maths-y story, but it's sort of complex math that ends up looking like a children's toy. And what I want you to imagine is a sort of a little plastic ball. But instead of a sphere, instead of round, it's kind of a funky shape. It's got a kind of bit missing from this corner and a bit sticking out there. And when you roll it down a sort of gentle slope, rather than sort of rolling smoothly in a straight line, it does this sort of repeating wiggly path and sort of rolls to the left and up slightly and then round and then blu-la-lu-la-la and wiggles its way to the bottom. I hope I've explained that well.

Nick Petrić Howe

Well, yeah, let's see if I've got this straight. So some researchers have made some funky shapes that when they roll them down a gentle slope, they follow like a wiggly path.

Shamini Bundell

They follow a specific wiggly path, not just any wiggly path—

Nick Petrić Howe

—oh sorry—

Shamini Bundell

Yeah, this is the key part of it for these researchers. And it sounds like when I'm speaking to the researcher that this whole thing started off almost as a dare, you know, someone in this particular research institute in South Korea made a throwaway comment that like, well, obviously you couldn't do this. And this particular researcher is like, I'm gonna go and do it. I'm going to prove that I can. And what it was, what he wanted to do was to draw a line, you know, sort of going down a slope, and work out which shape would then follow that line as it rolls down. And that was the start of what has now become this paper where they've made an algorithm that will do this for them where they can draw a line, a path essentially, and the algorithm will say, here is the precise shape you need to wobble along down that particular path that you've just drawn.

Nick Petrić Howe

This is such a fascinating little bit of research, but you know, I'm a successful graduate of primary school. So I'm familiar with the idea that different shapes roll differently. But how on earth, and maybe skip some of the maths here for me, do you get a shape that will roll down any path that you choose? Like, what was their sort of crucial insight?

Shamini Bundell

Well there's this sort of basic idea, so imagine just a sort of soft, squishy sphere. And if you sort of draw a curve, and then you roll the ball along that particular curve, but as you're rolling it, you kind of push down slightly so that the clay gets pushed up and indented. So you end up with no longer a sphere, that this sort of smooth, indented surface, that surface that you've just created is the exact sort of shape needed to roll along that particular curve that you've just pushed down. So that's sort of the, you know, very simple starting point. And that's basically what their algorithm does as well, it sort of takes a sphere and looks at where a sphere will intersect the plane, that you're rolling it down, and then sort of shaves those bits off. And then you come up with a shape with all the relevant bits shaved off. That will... yeah, hopefully, theoretically, follow the path.

Nick Petrić Howe

So I guess this worked quite well in a computer. But then did they actually roll some shapes down little hills?

Shamini Bundell

Oh, yeah. So that's the fun part is being able to actually... they 3D printed them and yeah, rolled them down very gentle slopes. And again, you can see in the in the video, then just sort of like placing this little shape down and giving a little nudge, so it gets just the right amount of energy to start rolling, and then sort of keep going down this little slope. They found it harder in reality than in the ideal conditions. They had sort of these plastic shapes with a weight inside, rolling down, I think just paper mostly, but I think they found in certain situations, they needed more friction, which is something the algorithm doesn't sort of take into account or include. But if you don't have enough friction, then sometimes the shape starts slipping instead of rolling, which is a problem. And they also found that just in terms of the sort of kinetics and energy of a shape, rolling down a slope, things like where the shape has to, you know, it's rolling down, but then there's a section of the path that is uphill, again, not impossible, but much harder in real life, where you've got to have exactly the right sort of momentum to get it round, compared to in the computer.

Nick Petrić Howe

I mean, this sounds really fun. And I mean, I guess, because you described it as almost like—

Shamini Bundell

—it started as a bit of fun—

Nick Petrić Howe

—Yeah, maybe why they did this is the wrong question. But does it have any sort of actual use in the real world?

Shamini Bundell

They didn't set out to find something functional, they described it as curiosity driven research. There are surprisingly, maybe surprisingly, potential applications. And the weirdest one is basically like quantum physics, quantum optics, this could potentially be relevant, because quite often, you have quantum states, you know, so you have two possible states, that can be represented as the top and bottom of a sphere. So when you have quantum states, these are often represented as points on the surface of a sphere—

Nick Petrić Howe

—woah—

Shamini Bundell

—and then you have sort of potential change of state from one place to another, represented as a path drawn on the surface of the sphere. And actually, what this team have been doing with their algorithm that makes, you know, turns a sphere into a rolly path, is that they've kind of represented that as a path drawn on the surface of a sphere and then which bits of the sphere need to be sort of sliced away in order to get the shape right. So a lot of their maths is about how do you fit a particular pattern on the surface of a sphere, starting at one point and then coming back round to the same point. So potentially, this could have some sort of fundamental mathematical relevance to quantum physics.

Nick Petrić Howe

If nothing else, I think you've convinced me to watch the video because I want to see some of the shapes rolling down hills, and listeners, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. But for my story this week, I've been reading about a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks. And I've been reading about this in Nature.

Shamini Bundell

Ah, so I've certainly heard this story for many years of Henrietta Lacks, and her cells, which are of vital importance for medical research, it's a particular cell line, is that right?

Nick Petrić Howe

Yes, it's a HeLa cells, which will be very, very familiar to anyone who's ever even brushed up against cell biology before, because they are very commonly used, and the very important cells because they have the ability to survive and divide forever. So, they have been vital in a lot of discoveries, even a few Nobel Prizes in the biological sciences. But they were taken from Henrietta Lacks more than 70 years ago without her consent. And so this settlement is about, I guess, sort of righting one of these historical wrongs, because many companies have made a lot of money from these cells that were taken without her permission.

Shamini Bundell

And I suppose at the time, no one knew what these cells were going to become. But this was basically she had a cancer, and it was a sample of some cancer cells, some tumor cells?

Nick Petrić Howe

Yeah, that's right. She had cervical cancer, and it was a sample of these cells that they took. And since around 2010, there's been a lot more attention given to this, because there was a book that came out, that sort of really shone a light on what had happened here, and how unethical it was. And so for a while lawyers and the family of Henrietta Lacks, have been trying to sort of reach a settlement. And in this case, they've reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific. And, you know, the family has said, they're really proud of the research that has been done, but this is sort of, like as I say, sort of righting this historical wrong.

Shamini Bundell

Because she was completely unrecognised for this, you know, almost unbelievably huge contribution for so long. But I wonder, are there other cases like this now that this particular settlement has been made? Is this the end of it? Or? Or might there be other similar cases?

Nick Petrić Howe

Well, this settlement is the first of its kind. So it may set a precedent for future settlements. We don't know the details, because this was a settlement reached outside of court. So exactly what was agreed between the parties is not public, but what one of the lawyers representing the family has said is that other lawsuits might follow because there are other companies who have been using HeLa cells and profiting from them. And so he said they may pursue litigation for that. However, it may not lead to like opening the floodgates of lots of this sort of litigation, because this seems like kind of a unique case, because there was no consent given typically, cells that are used in biology are voluntarily donated for medical research so people know what it is they're agreeing to. One thing that is interesting is that a lot of research uses human tissue, that is sort of waste, that is discarded during surgery, and people consent to the procedure, they don't necessarily consent to that waste being used. But it could open a discussion for more sort of broader consent, it may lead to systems where patients consent to a broader use of their cells, for example.

Shamini Bundell

This story, sort of, seems to touch on a lot of interesting elements, doesn't it in terms of, sort of, informed consent and needing consent for scientific research, and you know, what companies are making money off. And and also just this one individual who was sort of forgotten to history for a while, or certainly underrecognised, who's had such a big impact.

Nick Petrić Howe

Definitely, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people have been familiar for a long time with HeLa cells, but not that many people until recently probably knew what that meant. And the other thing this touches on as well is the sort of racial inequities that are sort of embedded in research. Lacks was a Black woman and the hospital where the cells were taken was one of the few that provided medical care to Black people. And then companies have profited from that. So there's a lot of aspects to this. And in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement, and things like that, there have been some sort of reparations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute made a six figure gift to a Henrietta Lacks foundation in recognition of this. So there's a lot of things to draw from this. And there's a lot more that we can think out in terms of ethics of research and how things are used in the future. I think this case, really highlights how things can go wrong and what we can try and do to avoid that going forward.

Shamini Bundell

Well, that is fascinating. Thank you, Nick, and listeners, we've got more on these stories. You can check out the show notes for some links, and you can also sign up for The Nature Briefing there and get more stories like these delivered to your email.

Nick Petrić Howe

And, of course, if Shamini's description of rolling shapes has piqued your interest, you can find it on our YouTube channel. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Shamini Bundell

Speaking of YouTube, the podcast, this very podcast that you're now listening to is actually currently available on YouTube. So if you prefer to listen to your podcasts via YouTube, you can find it there. Let us know what you think. If you want to get in touch with us about that or anything else, as always, we're on Twitter @naturepodcast, or you can send an email to podcast@nature.com I'm Shamini Bundell.

Nick Petrić Howe

And I'm Nick Petrić Howe. Thanks for listening.