Description
How important is political trust for migration policy preferences in contexts of large-scale displacement and limited state capacity? Evidence from the US and Europe suggests people holding greater political trust support more open policies because they believe their governments can manage any implied costs. Yet political trust may not moderate preferences in countries with limited state capacity. Here, interpersonal trust in migrants and refugees may matter more as citizens circumvent formal institutions in forming preferences. Employing conjoint experiments in Colombia and Peru--low-capacity and low-trust countries that experienced large migration shocks in the context of Venezuelan forced displacement--we show that these forms of trust moderate multidimensional policy preferences differently. While greater political trust is associated with less-restrictive preferences on migrants' employment rights and numerical limits, greater interpersonal trust is associated with more open preferences across \textit{all} domains--including geographic restrictions, access to healthcare, family reunification, and protection periods. Our findings contribute novel evidence of boundary conditions for the roles of different forms of trust in shaping migration policy preferences, notably the limited importance of political trust and its partial substitution by interpersonal trust in countries with low state capacity.
