Segmented political assimilation: perceptions of racialized opportunities and Latino immigrants' partisan identification

Abstract

To account for Latino immigrants' assimilation into the American political mainstream, I derive social psychological factors from the contextual notion of 'modes of incorporation' in the segmented assimilation literature. These social psychological factors, perceptions of racialized opportunities (PROPs), relate to immigrants' adoption of political party identities (i.e. Democrat, Republican). I test these PROPs factors utilizing the 2006 Latino National Survey (N05,717 immigrant Latino respondents). Multinomial logistic regressions predicting party identification, compared to either 'Don't Know' or 'Don't Care' options, indicate that PROPs are significantly related to Latino immigrants' identification as either Democrats or Republicans. High levels of identification with perceived white opportunities are related to Republican identity and high levels of identification with perceived black opportunities differentiate Democrats from Republicans.

Asian American Attitudes towards a US Citizenship Path for Illegal Immigrants: Immigration Reform as Racialised Politics

“…In the same study, stronger identification with white opportunities was linked to opposition to government intervention in health care while stronger identification with black opportunities was linked to support for government intervention in health care. Samson (2014) also found that Latino immigrants who identify more strongly with white opportunities are more likely to politically identify as Republican, while Latino immigrants who identify more strongly with black opportunities are more likely to politically identify as Democrat than Republican, essentially rendering Republican and Democrat partisanship as ethnoracially related identities into which immigrants assimilate after arriving in the USA. Samson argues that whether ethnoracial group-differentiated structural opportunities do in fact exist as separate mobility pathways is less germane to the social psychological theory of PROPs than the fact that people perceive such trajectories exist and differ in meaningful ways.…”

“…First, a fuller test of the PROPs theory comparable to earlier tests among Latino samples would incorporate perceptions of shared economic commonality in addition to the political commonality measures utilised here (Samson 2012(Samson , 2014. While multiple item measures of an underlying construct are ideal, the survey only contained one item to operationalise perceived racialised opportunities.…”

“…While Samson (2014) detailed how factors shaping Latino immigrants' mode of incorporation might affect the development of perceptions of shared opportunities with whites, blacks or other Latinos, this study argues that a few additional contextual factors may also shape distinct Asian American subgroups' development of PROPs. First, to summarise earlier PROPs research, factors such as employment bias may decrease perceived commonality with whites, unfair treatment by law enforcement may increase perceived commonality with African Americans and discrimination based on nativity would likely increase perceived commonality with Latinos.…”

“…Building upon these insights of distinct ethnoracial mobility trajectories, Samson (Samson 2012;Samson 2014) proposed that understanding how an ethnoracial group member places their ethnoracial group in relation to other groups' racialised mobility trajectories might predict that individual's political attitudes. The PROPs theory proposed that immigrants view the aforementioned segmented trajectories in terms of the economic and political opportunities stereotypically available to the three largest ethnoracial groups in the USA-whites as a proxy for the European immigrant upward mobility trajectory, Latinos as a proxy of ethnically based upward mobility and blacks as a proxy for the stagnant or downward assimilation trajectory.…”

“…Some of the factors that shape attitudes towards immigrants and immigration policy in the USA include network characteristics (Berg 2009), immigrants' skill levels (Hainmueller and Hiscox 2010), perceptions about the economy (Calavita 1996;Espenshade and Hempstead 1996;Citrin et al 1997;Burns and Gimpel 2000), perceived job and tax impact (Citrin et al 1997), group affect (Citrin et al 1997), group stereotypes (Burns and Gimpel 2000), social and political alienation (Espenshade and Hempstead 1996), isolationist mentality (Espenshade and Hempstead 1996), religion (Knoll 2009), language-based cultural threat (Chandler and Tsai 2001) and proportion of Hispanics or Asians at the metropolitan and census tract levels (Ha 2010). None of these explore the relationship between immigration attitudes and the social psychological identification with perceived racialised opportunities (Samson 2012;Samson 2014). The theory of perceptions of racialised opportunities (PROPs) argues that perceptions of socioeconomic and political opportunities shared in common with whites, blacks or Latinos, each representing stereotypically distinct mobility trajectories, are associated with a person's race-related political attitudes.…”