An academic study about the attitudes of European citizens has concluded that most Europeans prefer not to allow any Muslim immigrants into their countries. Common sense would suggest the same result to the average person, but common sense seems to be distributed in inverse proportion to the number of letters appended to one’s surname.

It’s like commissioning an opinion poll to discover how people would feel about falling into a bed of stinging nettles.

But such is academia. Many thanks to JLH for translating this article from Die Welt:

Europeans Do Not Want Muslim Asylum Seekers

by Tobias Heimbach
September 22, 2016

A study has shown that Europeans are more likely to accept refugees if they are highly qualified and Christian.

1.		Acceptance is much stronger among Europeans for politically motivated flight to Europe than if it is economically motivated.
2.		Christians are preferred to agnostics. The study’s authors confirm a strong distaste for Muslims.

Why this is important:

Many refugees to Europe do not meet the preferred criteria of citizens. Integrating these people could be difficult.

Europeans have no clear idea of which refugees should be granted asylum — and which should not. The effect is especially negative if an immigrant is Muslim, poorly educated and cannot speak the country’s language.

This result is supplemented by a study for which researchers of Stanford University, the University of Zurich and the London School of Economics questioned 18,000 Europeans from fifteen countries, Germans among them. “Our results show that all refugees are not the same in the eyes of the European public,” said the political scientist Dominik Hangartner, one of the authors of the study.

According to the survey, younger asylum applicants who are well-educated and have a greater command of the country’s language are preferred in all countries. Doctors and teachers are more readily accepted than uneducated immigrants. “We were surprised how similar the results were across Europe. Neither the geographic location of the country nor the number of previously accepted immigrants played any apparent role.”

Religion of Refugees Plays a Significant Role

Not only economic questions play a role, but also the personal refugee history of an immigrant. Someone who was tortured had an eleven per cent better probability of being accepted by the participants in the study.

This is also true of people who are persecuted for ethnic, political or religious reasons. Those polled prefer giving asylum to them than to persons who fled for economic reasons.

“We Underestimated the Significance of Religion”

The religion of asylum seekers is important to Europeans. In every country, Muslims are more strongly rejected than other groups. “Since Christians are only slightly preferred to agnostics, this demonstrates a strong aversion to Muslims, rather than, for instance, a strong preference for Christians,” says Hangartner.

Hangartner’s interpretation of the study is that the preference for people with certain characteristics places on the political system “a major challenge to accept and integrate asylum seekers.” Because most asylum applicants do not fit the preferred criteria, since they are from Muslim countries and seldom master the language of the target land before their flight.

500,000 Rejected Asylum Seekers Not Deported

The authors said that, despite a preference for certain refugees, the study makes clear that Europeans are generally prepared to offer protection in their country to asylum seekers with acceptable reasons for fleeing.

The scholars of the University of Zurich cooperated on the study with colleagues of the elite [!] Stanford University and the London School of Economics. They created 180,000 fictitious refugee profiles with nine differentiating criteria. Among them were data about gender, age, country of origin, occupational background, religion, linguistic ability, reasons for fleeing, possibility of being in danger and coherence of the assessment of the person.

Using this profile, those polled had to decide whether an immigrant should or should not be allowed be allowed to stay in their country. The second step in the process requires them to decide between two cases.