This article posits that the key to understanding the low levels of political involvement within contemporary immigrant communities, such as Asian and Latino communities, requires a closer examination of the partisan socialization process of the native-born children of immigrants. This article finds that many native-born children of immigrants, otherwise known as second-generation Americans, experience what I call a “prolonged partisan socialization process.” In the absence of parental partisan transmission, many second-generation Americans are left to find their own path to partisan attainment. The consequences of this are that many second-generation Americans eventually come to find their partisan identity outside of the home and much later in life. These findings disrupt the traditional partisan attainment story, which assumes that partisanship is the product of a process of socialization led by parents. Accounting for this prolonged socialization process provides significant insight into why partisan identification, and by extension political participation, among many second-generation Americans, such as Latinos and Asians appears muted. Therefore, while it will likely take some time for many within these contemporary immigrant communities to reach “partisan maturity,” we should not mistake the prolonged socialization process to mean that these individuals are destined to be politically disengaged.

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Extensive research on political participation suggests that parental resources strongly predict participation. Other research indicates that salient political events can push individuals to participate. I offer a novel explanation of how mundane household experiences translate to political engagement, even in settings where low participation levels are typically found, such as immigrant communities. I hypothesize that experiences requiring children of Latinx immigrants to take on “adult” responsibilities provide an environment where children learn the skills needed to overcome the costs associated with participation. I test this hypothesis using three datasets: a survey of Latinx students, a representative survey of young adults, and a 10-year longitudinal study. The analyses demonstrate that Latinx children of immigrants taking on adult responsibilities exhibit higher levels of political activity compared with those who do not. These findings provide new insights into how the cycle of generational political inequality is overcome in unexpected ways and places.

Within the politically charged immigration system in the United States, Congress mandates the entry of in absentia removal orders against immigrants who fail to appear for immigration court hearings. Statutory guidance similarly constrains the ability of appellate courts to overturn those in absentia orders. In this article, we examine how federal circuit court judges make decisions in the review of in absentia orders when faced with discretion-revoking congressional statutory language pitted against a highly politicized area of law where policy preferences sit at the forefront of judges’ minds. Using an original dataset of U.S. Courts of Appeals cases decided from 2001 to 2020, we find that pro-immigrant decisions are rare, as intended by the governing statute. We also find, however, that judicial policy preferences predict the degree to which federal judges support the petitioning immigrant through statutory factors related to the adequacy of government notice and the presence of exceptional circumstances to justify nonappearance.

We began by examining views of free speech among respondents who were randomly assigned to the control condition. This allowed us to assess whether there were baseline differences in general support for free speech between Republicans and Democrats in the sample. For this analysis, we used ordinary least squares to regress the outcome on a categorical