Closing the Membership Gap? Membership Penalties, Signals of Commitment and Support for Redistribution

Immigrants face a “membership penalty”: while migrants often face a myriad of prejudices, they are also often judged as less committed to their new country compared to native-born citizens, and as a result, the public often feels justified in excluding them from social and political rights. In this paper, we first document the size of this membership gap in the comparative context. We then explore whether membership perceptions can be manipulated with signals about the economic and social contributions of immigrants through a series of unique social media profile experiments. Conducted in five countries (US, Canada, UK, France, China) in 2025, the experiments present the profile of a fictional person (either an immigrant or native-born citizen) who is raising money to help the victims of a natural disaster.  We manipulate whether the disaster occurred in the country of the survey, the country of origin of the immigrant, or some third country. Our hypothesis is that an immigrants' choice of who to help will be interpreted as a signal of their membership commitment (or lack of commitment), and that this in turn will directly influence assessments of the immigrants' deservingness for social rights. We also manipulate work status and race to show that signals of membership commitment matter in a way that are not reducible to these familiar factors that shape deservingness judgements, and this is particularly true for immigrants compared to native-born citizens. The results of this study seek to 1) document the extent of the membership penalty in an experimental context, 2) document the extent of malleability of membership perceptions, and 3) the influence of membership cues on support for redistribution.