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Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy

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Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy

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Abstract

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 immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.

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Notes

1. One partial exception is Ramakrishnan et al. ( 2010), who randomly vary a hypothetical immigrant's national origin and legal status simultaneously. But they do not report direct comparisons of the role of an illegal and legal immigrants' national origin.

2. Encouragingly, respondents did not appear unduly burdened: in Study 1, for example, only 9.2 % of all choices garnered a "don't know" response, and over 83 % of respondents never chose that option. Of those that did, more than half did so three times or fewer out of five and fewer than a quarter answered "DK" for all five choices. DK responses are excluded from subsequent analyses.

3. The test question noted the importance of subjects' attention to the survey and included a preamble stating that subjects should check the boxes next to the response options yellow and brown, which were two among seven total color options, irrespective of their true answer to the subsequent question. Subjects were then asked to select their favorite color or colors. Excluding subjects who failed this test does not materially alter any of the results we present below.

4. While this is, strictly speaking, conditioning on a post-treatment covariate, our purpose in doing so is geared towards description rather than causal explanation.

References

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Hopkins, D. J. (2013). The upside of accents: Language, skin tone, and attitudes toward immigration. SSRN Working Paper 1879965.

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Valentino, N. A., & Iyengar, S. (2011). Skin vs. skill: Exploring economic vs. racial threats as drivers of immigration opinion in the comparative context. Paper presented at the 2011 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL.

Vaughan, J. (2013). http://www.cis.org/vaughan/senate-bill-rewards-protects-lawbreakers-undermines-law-enforcement.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all of those who provided constructive feedback on this manuscript over the course of its development. This includes anonymous reviewers, individual readers too numerous to list, participants at two rounds of the Comparative Approaches to Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion workshop (at MIT in 2013 and Stanford in 2014), and those who attended presentations at the annual meetings of the MPSA in 2013 and 2014. We take full responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. American University, Washington, DC, USA

Matthew Wright

2. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Morris Levy

3. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Jack Citrin

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthew Wright.

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Wright, M., Levy, M. & Citrin, J. Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making. Polit Behav 38, 229-253 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-015-9311-y
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Keywords

Immigration

Public opinion

United States

Conjoint

Illegal immigration

Path to citizenship

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

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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.

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