All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration

Branton, Regina; Cassese, Erin C.; Jones, Bradford S.; Westerland, Chad

doi:10.1017/s0022381611000375

Cited by 106 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Media exposure, too, could play this role depending on the extent and tone of coverage on the issue (Dunaway et al 2010;Valentino et al 2012). Finally, the broader political context-both ''dramatic'' events such as terror attacks (Branton et al 2011) or longer-term reform efforts (Schildkraut 2012)-may affect the structure of individual choices.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

2015

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Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and 'socio-psychological' sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: ''attribute-based'' judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants' desirability based on individual characteristics-human capital, race, language ability, and so on-and ''categorical'' judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries' individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants' attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

2015

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“…Finally, the broader political context -both "dramatic" events such as terror attacks (Branton et al 2011) or longer-term reform efforts (Schildkraut 2012) -may affect the structure of individual choices.…”

Section: Legalization and A Pathway To Citizenship For The 12 Millionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict and Consensus on American Public Opinion on Illegal Immigration

2014

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The literature on public attitudes toward immigration devotes more attention to mass preferences over the admission and treatment of legal immigrants than to explaining attitudes toward illegal immigration. We theorize both similarity and difference in the nature and underpinnings of public opinion across domains. Two recent surveys, each employing a novel variant of conjoint analysis, help us test these expectations. We underline "categorical" response -that is, the rejection or acceptance of all profiles regardless of traits -on the pathway issue, both extensive in absolute terms (roughly 40% of respondents) and relative to assessments on legal admissions. This tendency also explains the entirety of the favorability gap between legal and illegal profiles assessed. On the other hand, those who do not express categorical responses emphasize the importance of both ethnocultural and human capital-related considerations, and the relative weight of these considerations is stable both regardless of the legality condition and across numerous political predispositions.

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confidence: 99%

“…A prominent set of explanations for these seeming inconsistencies has focused on the attributes of immigrants who are salient or “top‐of‐the‐head”—especially those depicted in the media (Branton, Cassese, Jones, & Westerland, ; Zaller & Feldman, ). In particular, indicators of a salient immigrant's assimilation to mainstream American cultural norms have repeatedly demonstrated pronounced effects on immigration attitudes (Branton et al, ; Schildkraut, ; Wright, Levy, & Citrin, ). Yet in contrast to its effect on attitudes toward many other policy issues disproportionately affecting non‐Whites, the racialized physical traits of salient beneficiaries—and particularly Afrocentric physical traits—have failed to demonstrate a clear relationship with immigration attitudes (Harell, Soroka, Iyengar, & Valentino, ; Hopkins, ; Iyengar et al, ).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Backyard Politics of Attitudes Toward Immigration

Ostfeld

2015

Political Psychology

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Using two survey experiments, I reconsider the role that the racialized physical traits and level of assimilation of salient immigrants play in shaping attitudes toward immigration. In the first experiment, a nationwide sample of 767 White, non-Latino adults was exposed to a story about a family of undocumented immigrants living in the Unites States who were at risk of deportation. Subjects were randomly assigned to view a version of the story in which the immigrants were depicted with light skin and stereotypically Eurocentric features, or dark skin and stereotypically Afrocentric features, and their level of assimilation to mainstream American culture was suggested to be high or low. Similar to previous research, the study's results show that assimilation has a direct effect on attitudes toward immigration. Yet in contrast to previous studies, the racialized physical traits proved to be a much more important factor in shaping attitudes toward immigration than previously demonstrated. The role of an immigrant's racialized physical traits was replicated in a second survey experiment of 902 White, non-Latino adults. Overall, the findings shed new light on how media depictions of immigrants are affecting immigration attitudes, as well as the nuanced ways that race continues to shape public opinion in the United States today.

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All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration

Cited by 106 publications

References 40 publications

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Conflict and Consensus on American Public Opinion on Illegal Immigration

The Backyard Politics of Attitudes Toward Immigration

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