The Relation of Drug Trafficking Fears and Cultural Identity to Attitudes Toward Mexican Immigrants in Five South Texas Communities

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of research investigating the relationship of spill-over fears related to drug trafficking and of cultural identity to Mexican Americans’ attitudes toward recent immigrants from Mexico in five non-metropolitan communities in the US–Mexico borderlands of South Texas. A mixed methods design was used to collect data from 91 participants (30 intact families with two parents and at least one young adult). Quantitative findings showed that the majority of participants expressed the view that most people in their communities believed that newcomers were involved in drug trafficking and in defrauding welfare programs. A significant interaction indicated that Mexican cultural identity buffered the negative effects of drug trafficking fears as related to the view that the newcomers were creating problems in the communities and region. Qualitative data yielded positive and negative themes, with those that were negative being significantly more numerous. The findings have implications for intra-ethnic relations in borderlands communities as well as for immigration policy.

Conspiracies and Restorative Violence in American Culture

“…They especially fear and hate increasing ethnic diversity in the United States (Major et al, 2018), and in the 2016 election, people voted for Trump overwhelmingly because they believe he will punish non-whites, and speaks to their belief that white people are widely persecuted (Smith and Hanley, 2018). They embrace the illusion that people of color have swarmed into the country as illegal and morally degenerate immigrants (Ramirez et al, 2016), and that black people reproduce in huge numbers and consume resources in gluttonous quantities through lazy abuse of welfare handouts (Roberts, 2017 (1997) Strings, 2019), and this has eliminated opportunities for whites (McVeigh and Estep, 2019; Metzl, 2020). White supremacist ethnonationalism amplifies these long-standing illusions into vast ethnic conspiracies and subversion, that today, massive numbers of illegal immigrants supposedly voted in the 2016 election (Edelson et al, 2017; Udani and Kimball, 2018), that people of color consume the majority of the federal budget through welfare cheating (Bjorklund et al, 2018), and that foreign-born citizens and permanent residents are a kind of counterfeit citizen unless they are white and speak English (DeJesus et al, 2018; Dowling et al, 2012).…”