General ethnocentrism seems to be a powerful antecedent of immigration opinion, typically displaying larger effects than economic concerns. News about immigration, however, may focus attention on a particular group in a given historical moment. We predict group-specific affect, not general ethnocentrism, should most powerfully shape immigration policy opinion in the contemporary United States. We test this expectation with content analyses of news coverage, survey data from 1992 to 2008, a survey experiment, and official statistics. First, we find that mentions of Latinos in news coverage of immigration outpace mentions of other groups beginning in 1994, the year when Proposition 187, a proposal in California to end most social welfare and educational assistance to illegal immigrants, garnered significant national attention. Second, while ethnocentrism dominates economic concerns in explanations of Whites' immigration policy opinions, attitudes toward Latinos in particular account for nearly all of the impact of ethnocentrism since 1994. Finally, journalistic attention to Latino immigration roughly parallels actual rates of immigration from Latin America, suggesting the media shaping of policy opinion around this group may be driven by real-world demographic patterns.

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Since the first half of the twentieth century, whites have become much more accepting of the principle of racial equality even as they have continued to endorse negative racial stereotypes about African-Americans. Some scholars argue that this ambivalence has been exploited by contemporary political elites who have learned to fashion subtle racial appeals that activate these latent attitudes without appearing to violate widely held norms of racial equality. This strategy has been dubbed racial priming. In this brief article, we summarize and evaluate the work in this area, with a particular emphasis on studies that employ experimental research designs.

The attitudes that whites have about race have been a defining component of their political views since at least the American Civil War. Most of the social science research to date, however, has not focused on the attitudes white people have about their own group. Instead, it has examined almost exclusively the attitudes that white people have toward racial and ethnic minority groups, and especially toward black people. Indeed, the study of attitudes that white people have toward “out-groups” in the form of racial prejudice, racial stereotypes, and racial resentment has been an important and growing component of political science research. Less research, however, has attended to the attitudes that white people have toward their own group and the political consequences of these beliefs. On the one hand, this lacuna is somewhat surprising, especially given the extent to which work in political science has otherwise noted the important role of group identities—or the psychological attachments individuals have toward relevant social groups—in driving political preferences and behavior. On the other hand, a focus on related concepts like whiteness, white identity, or white consciousness has been limited because researchers have assumed that whites’ dominant status in Western societies means that they are less conscious of their race. In other words, because white people have historically composed the numerical majority of the population in the United States and in Western European countries, and because they have possessed the lion’s share of social, political, and economic power in the United States and Western Europe, whites have been able to take their race for granted in a way that racial and ethnic minorities have not. To the extent that previous scholarship has considered whiteness, it largely focused on whiteness as an ideology of oppression or whiteness as an invisible group identity. More recently, however, renewed attention has been paid to whiteness as a visible social identity, with scholars arguing that the growing demographic diversity, increases in immigration, globalization, perceptions of anti-white discrimination, and status threat make it more likely today that whites will see their racial group as a salient one with shared political interests. As a result, white identity is politically consequential for a range of political attitudes and behaviors, including opinion on immigration policy, contemporary political candidate and partisan preferences, attitudes about diversity and globalization, preferences for certain social welfare policies, opinion toward far-right parties, and more. It is also important to note that most of the research in this domain has been US-centric, but a growing body of work has attended to whiteness and white identity in Western Europe.