How Watershed Immigration Policies Affect American Public Opinion over a Lifetime

Abstract

Important political events are known to influence political socialization and development (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler ). It is also possible that such events impact political socialization within particular age cohorts, and also across important social groups who may be impacted differently by landmark events. This paper examines whether landmark immigration events can leave a permanent mark on an individual's views toward immigrants and immigration, and whether that impact varies across different ethnic/racial groups in the United States Specifically, we examine the cohort of individuals who were in their formative years during the passage of major US immigration bills that were proposed or enacted from 1965 to 2010. Altogether, we focus on four pieces of landmark immigration legislation. The findings reveal variations on the effect of these events depending on the group in question; a relationship also emerges between these landmark legislative events and attitudes on immigration policies. The analysis contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the ways in which political elites influence attitudes, and we discuss how the findings may apply to other contexts outside the US.

Social Welfare Attitudes and Immigrants as a Target Population: Experimental Evidence

“…The fiscal threat prime had no discernible effect on non-white respondents but made non-Hispanic whites more than 40% more likely to identify immigrants and not people born in the United States as likely beneficiaries. This is consistent with recent work showing that African Americans (Carter 2019) and Hispanic Americans (Rocha et al 2011;Abrajano and Lundgren 2015) have fundamentally different views of immigration than non-Hispanic whites.…”

Media Framing and Partisan Identity: The Case of Immigration Coverage and White Macropartisanship

“…They are most likely to be in competition with immigrants for jobs and resources, but as a minority group often portrayed negatively in the media, they may take umbrage at negative media portrayals of other minorities. There has been evidence that suggests that African-Americans hold sympathetic views toward immigration (see Abrajano and Lundgren 2014).…”

Political Effects of Having Undocumented Parents

“…Cohort effects are clearest in times of upheaval such as the Great Depression, but can also reflect narrower events like the Watergate scandal (Dinas 2013). There is also evidence that cohort effects differ for ethnic and racial minorities (Abrajano and Lundgren 2014), especially when racial politics is at stake, as in the civil rights era (Schuman and Scott 1989).…”