Allocation of Scarce Resources with Refugees Amid COVID-19 on the Eye of Locals

The global refugee crisis, which has affected many countries, has also had a significant impact in Turkey, the country with the highest number of refugees in the world. However, when the pandemic suddenly shook the world agenda, the refugee issue was also pushed to the background. Due to the fact that the pandemic has lasted long, its intense social impact has undoubtedly raised perceptions of immigrants to a level that increases security. In this context, it is an expected, if not ethical, pattern of behavior that natives are particularly sensitive to vaccines to which they have limited access and reluctant to share their resources on health issues. Integrated threat theory has been studied several times in the literature in different immigrant groups or minorities and in Syrian refugees in Turkey. However, it has not yet been studied whether the native population’s attitudes toward refugees change according to the integrated threat theory under the influence of COVID-19 as a deep-rooted and global variable. For this reason, the aim of this study is to multidimensionally examine the impact of the pandemic process, whose effects are still ongoing but have made progress, on refugees’ views. In this regard, data will be collected through a survey to measure refugees’ perceptions. In the data collection, data from 843 participants were collected online via Google Forms, ensuring a homogeneous distribution of variables such as income group, gender, and education level. The collected data were then analyzed. The analysis revealed that the majority of participants perceive Syrian refugees as a significant threat to the Turkish economy particularly during pandemic. Regarding xenophobic discourse, it was observed that most participants were far removed from xenophobic rhetoric and focused more on the material aspects of the refugee crisis rather than evaluating it from a discriminatory perspective. Additionally, study found out a strong correlation between the level of education and integrated threat perceptions. In parallel, xenophobic discourse was found to have a strong and positive impact on integrated threat perceptions and having no relationship with income level.