Secularity and migration aspirations in the Arab world

This study develops a new theoretical framework to explain how secularity influences migration aspirations in the Arab world. We argue that secular individuals incur significant psychological costs when living in highly religious societies. This value incongruence pushes them to seek out more secular environments, whereas strongly religious individuals face higher cultural costs of moving and thus prefer to stay. We derive testable hypotheses on how individual secularity and socio-political secularity act as push−pull factors for different communities and migration destinations. We then test these hypotheses using 2018−2019 Arab Barometer data from eleven MENA countries. We construct original indices for individual secularity and socio-political secularity via multiple correspondence analysis. Consistent with our theory, probit and instrumental-variable probit estimates show that secular individuals are significantly more likely to express intentions to emigrate − particularly to highly secular Western countries. Among Muslim majority populations, both individual and socio-political secularity increase the desire to migrate, whereas among Christian minorities only individual secularity has this effect. Moreover, secularity drives regular migration aspirations, with no measurable impact on irregular migration except in the case of religiously unaffiliated “nones,” who exhibit a heightened willingness to migrate by any means. These findings contribute to the migration literature by emphasizing the substantial, yet previously underexplored, influence of secular beliefs and practices on migratory behavior in the Arab context.