Europeans favour fair placement of migrants based on 'capacity': study

Citizens from Europe's wealthier nations accept that their countries should take more asylum seekers than poorer ones, researchers said on Monday.

In a survey of 18,000 eligible voters from 15 European nations a "large majority" said countries with more "capacity" should host more migrants.

Capacity is measured by a country's population size and gross domestic product, among other factors.

Simply leaving migrants in the country where they first arrive is not the answer, the survey participants said.

Yet this has been the practice to date -- creating a disproportionate burden for countries such as Greece and Turkey where many migrants from the Middle East and Africa first set foot.

Knowing how voters feel about hosting migrants should help draw up a better regional asylum system, said the authors of a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The results "suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism," they wrote.

"As Europe faces the most severe refugee crisis since World War II, reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has emerged as an urgent policy challenge for European governments," said the paper.

"With more than 1.3 million new asylum claims lodged in Europe in 2015 alone, policymakers are struggling to design robust and fair asylum policies that... also inspire domestic public support."

The matter "increasingly threatens the social cohesion" of European countries, said the authors.

The survey was conducted in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.

"A large majority (72 percent) of respondents prefer proportional allocation" of migrants based on country means, the researchers found.

This was the case "even in countries that would have to shoulder a greater responsibility compared with the status quo."

Only 18 percent of those surveyed voted for the country-of-first-entry approach.

The results suggested that reform "could be broadly agreeable to the public," said the authors.

"At the very least, they (policymakers) should be emboldened by this evidence that there is little reason to fear reprisal in the court of public opinion."