Rights Framing and Perspectives on Immigration Canada

This study explores whether appeals to human rights or Canadian values are effective in generating support for the extension of social protections to racialized and/or non-citizen residents in Canada. The project builds on previous research in the US (Voss et al. 2020) that examined whether framing hardships such as food insecurity and lack of access to health care as violations of civil rights, human rights, or American values affected public attitudes regarding rights or value violations or support for government action to address such hardships. The California-based experiment found that rights-based language had little effect on support for government action and that registered voters made clear distinctions regarding noncitizens’ deservingness for government assistance on the basis of their legal status. In this experiment, we similarly test whether human rights or national (“Canadian”) values frames have an impact on support for protections in Canada, and whether these differ on the basis of the individual’s racial or legal status in Canada. Principally, we analyze Canadians’ response to two rights-violation scenarios – food insecurity and police targeting – to assess if rights-based or value-based appeals affect Canadians’ support for co-citizens and noncitizens. Further, we manipulate the race and legal status of the individual profiled in the vignette to test whether such factors impact participants’ reactions to the frames. We anticipate that the frames will exert some effects on public attitudes regarding rights or values violations and support for government action, but that these effects will differ on the basis of race and legal status.