What drives people to migrate? Amid a stark increase in international migration at the global scale, we lack individual-level evidence that causally adjudicates between migration’s many drivers. We implement a survey experiment in Northern Lebanon—a hotbed of international migration—to a random sample of 1,000 Syrian refugees and 1,000 Lebanese residents. Respondents were shown the profile of a hypothetical Syrian refugee and asked whether they recommended that the refugee migrate to the European Union. The vignette randomly primed five prominent causes of migration, including push factors (political instability and poverty) and pull factors (open borders, employment opportunities, and cultural openness). We find that pull factors outweighed push factors, suggesting that migrants carefully weigh their chances in Europe. Still, all five primes yielded positive effect sizes, which underlines that prominent theories of migration are complements, not substitutes. Treatment effects were homogenous across salient subgroups, which supports a general theoretical framework of migration attitudes in which pull factors outweigh push factors. Taken together, the evidence suggests that empirical models of migration can be improved if they take into consideration both pull and push factors, rather than prioritizing one over the other.

是什么促使人们迁移？在全球范围内国际移徙急剧增加的背景下，我们缺乏个人水平的证据来对移徙的许多驱动因素之间进行因果关系的判断。我们在黎巴嫩北部（国际移徙的温床）进行了一项调查实验，随机抽取了1,000名叙利亚难民和1,000名黎巴嫩居民作为样本。向受访者展示了一个假想的叙利亚难民的概况，并询问他们是否建议该难民移居欧洲联盟。小插图随机引发了五个主要的移民原因，包括推动因素（政治不稳定和贫困）和拉动因素（开放边界，就业机会和文化开放）。我们发现，拉动因素胜过推挤因素，这表明移民仔细权衡了他们在欧洲的机会。仍然，所有这五个素数都产生了积极的效应大小，这突出说明了重要的迁移理论是补充，而不是替代。各显着亚组的治疗效果均一，这支持了迁移态度的一般理论框架，在该框架中，拉动因素胜于推动因素。综上所述，证据表明，如果将迁移的经验模型同时考虑拉动因素和推动因素，而不是优先考虑另一个因素，则可以改进迁移的经验模型。