The (un)making of a citizen: The role of skin tone in perceived immigrant status and support for hostile immigration policy.

Abstract

Researchers in diverse fields such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and geography have extensivly researched push and pull factors that lead to human migrations (Castles et al., 2014) and the political and economic consequences that migrations have on both sending and receiving countries (Golash-Boza, 2015). However, experimental investigations of the social categorization of citizenship or legal status are scarce. Given the incidence of hate crimes against immigrants of color and reports of racial profiling of American citizens of color falsely categorized as undocumented immigrants, research on skin tone, perceptions of immigration status, and immigration policy is both timely and important. The purpose of the current study was to explore whether people's skin tone affects how perceivers categorize their immigration and legal status and the potential link between perceivers' support for stringent immigration policies and specific patterns of categorization. Results suggest that people with brown (vs white or black) skin were more likely to be perceived as undocumented immigrants and that perceivers' ratings of an individual with brown skin as more likely to be an undocumented immigrant predicted higher levels of support for harsh immigration policies. Taken together, the findings offer new insight into the importance of skin tone and its impact on the separation and stratification of people, informing research on intergroup relations, support for policy, and, importantly, social justice. Practical and political implications for judgments influenced by the social categorization based on skin tone are discussed.

Dark faces in white spaces: The effects of skin tone, race, ethnicity, and intergroup preferences on interpersonal judgments and voting behavior

“…Conversely, non-White participants were more likely to vote for and felt warmer toward the politicians presented in the darker skin tones. Importantly, our data suggested that while the candidates' race/ethnicity on its own did not affect warmth toward and likelihood to vote for them overall, it significantly influenced voters when race/ethnicity was associated with specific skin tones (i.e., medium/Brown) most prominently associated with Mexican Americans (Chavez, 2013;Chirco & Buchanan, 2021). In addition to liking candidates in lighter skin tones, when presented with the same image of a candidate with the same skin tone, White participants were more likely to vote for the candidate identified as African American (vs. Mexican American).…”

“…Given the impact of Gen Z voters on the 2020 presidential election (Johnson Hess, 2020) and the importance of exploring the impact of skin tone on different demographics of voters, the data for Study 3 were collected from a pool of younger potential voters. According to a priori power analyses based on the results of previous research (Chirco & Buchanan, 2021), for medium to large effects ( d = .65), α = .05, and power (1 – β ) set at .80, the projected sample size needed (G*Power 3.1) was N = 128 for a between groups comparison (Faul et al., 2007). We sampled 190 ( M age = 22.43, SD = 6.15) undergraduate students enrolled in psychology courses at a university in the Pacific Northwest who received extra credit for their participation.…”

“…According to social identity theory (SIT), leaders are thought of as representing a group's properties (Hogg, 2001) because they are part of a social system that shares group membership and characteristics (Barreto & Hogg, 2017;Hogg et al, 2012)., Further, the sociofunctional approach to prejudice (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005) suggests that affective and behavioral responses elicited by groups reflect the types of threat they elicit, resulting in different forms of discrimination, including but not limited to impacts on voting behavior (Franks & Sherr, 2014). Because skin tone is an important phenotypic group characteristic (e.g., Chirco & Buchanan, 2021;Maddox, 2004;Stepanova & Strube, 2009), people may often use this information when making interpersonal judgments. In fact, research suggests that voters use this visible characteristic as a heuristic to evaluate political candidates (Anderson et al, 2020) and choose the leaders that most likely represent them (Hogg, 2001).…”

“…Because racial and ethnic minorities are disadvantaged along more than one dimension (Zou & Cheryan, 2017), a person of color may be privileged and disadvantaged at the same time. For example, whereas Latino individuals with lighter skin tones may face less prejudice than African American individuals with dark skin do as a function of skin tone bias, Latino people are generally seen as more foreign and, therefore, are more likely to experience specific types of discrimination due to perceived lack of citizenship (Chirco & Buchanan, 2021). As a consequence, ethnicity, in addition to skin tone, may affect voters’ preferences for a political candidate (Anderson et al., 2020).…”

Introduction to the special issue on the impact of race on psychological processes.

“…Chirco and Buchanan (2021) highlight the role that skin tone plays in peoples’ social categorization decisions. In an experiment, they demonstrate that brown skin tones (vs. White or Black skin tones) decrease perceptions of U.S. citizenship, with downstream implications for stringent immigration policy support.…”