'People Like Us': Empathy and Acceptance of Climate Migrants in Rural Bangladesh

As climate change intensifies, internal migration due to climate extreme events is becoming increasingly common in the Global South. Yet, little is known about how rural host communities respond to environmental migrants. This study investigates attitudes towards internally displaced environmental migrants in northern Bangladesh, focusing on three key mechanisms: perceived deservingness, empathy through geographic and experiential proximity, and personal contact. We draw on a pre-registered, face-to-face survey with 265 rural respondents. At the core of our survey is a forced-choice conjoint experimental design (N=936) to causally assess how different migrant characteristics -- including reason for migration, occupation, religion, and distance from origin -- influence host preferences. Findings show that migrants displaced by riverbank erosion are significantly more likely to be accepted than economic migrants, reflecting a strong role for deservingness in shaping attitudes. Environmental displacement also attenuates discrimination based on other migrant attributes, such as religion, occupation, and distance of migrant origin. Respondents who experienced similar environmental hardships, such as erosion-induced house loss, expressed the strongest preferences for environmentally displaced migrants, supporting the empathy mechanism. In contrast, simple exposure to in-migrants in the village had no measurable effect on attitudes, challenging assumptions about the universal benefits of intergroup contact. Our study extends the migration attitudes literature by focusing on internal, rural-to-rural displacement in a climate-vulnerable context. These findings highlight how moral judgments and experiential proximity can foster inclusive attitudes even in resource-constrained settings, with important implications for societal resilience under climate change.