2024/11/15 by Langlotz, Sarah, Leue, Sebastian, Michel, Paul
#Social and Behavioral Sciences
paper · doi:10.17605/osf.io/da8ft
Sea rescue, particularly civil sea rescue by non-governmental organizations, has been a central point of political and humanitarian contention in the European discourse on how to respond to increasing migration inflows. This projects investigates how beliefs about the presence of sea rescue operations in the Mediterranean affect perceptions about the migration route and the formation of migration aspirations to Europe in the countries of destination. To study this, we field an original online survey to respondents in Nigeria, a major country of origin of irregular migrants to the EU via the Central Mediterranean. We elicit how well potential migrants are informed about the risks associated with migrating to Europe in general, and about the presence of sea rescue activities in particular. Second, we embed an information provision experiment in which respondents are randomly informed about the presence of sea rescue operations in the Mediterranean to examine how sea rescue policy affects migrants' beliefs about the migration journey and migration aspirations to Europe.