What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat

Abstract

We examine whether and how elite discourse shapes mass opinion and action on immigration policy. One popular but untested suspicion is that reactions to news about the costs of immigration depend upon who the immigrants are. We confirm this suspicion in a nationally representative experiment: news about the costs of immigration boosts white opposition far more when Latino immigrants, rather than European immigrants, are featured. We find these group cues influence opinion and political action by triggering emotions-in particular, anxiety-not simply by changing beliefs about the severity of the immigration problem. A second experiment replicates these findings but also confirms their sensitivity to the stereotypic consistency of group cues and their context. While these results echo recent insights about the power of anxiety, they also suggest the public is susceptible to error and manipulation when group cues trigger anxiety independently of the actual threat posed by the group.

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

“…Jacobs and Theiss-Morse 2013; Kalkan et al 2009;Kinder and Kam 2009;Knoll 2009). Along these lines, Brader et al (2008) find that anxiety over immigration is related to antiLatino sentiment, and several studies tie anti-Hispanic bias to hostility toward illegal immigration in particular (Masuoka and Junn 2013;Hartman et al 2014;Ramakrishnan et al 2010). Finally, the literature also points to the importance of immigrants' human capital-education and work record, for example-possibly as an indication of the potential to contribute to the national economy (e.g.…”

“…Thus we reconsider the literature's nearly exclusive focus on sociopsychological and economic threats (e.g. Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014a, b;Citrin et al 1990;Hainmueller and Hiscox 2010;Hopkins 2013;Schildkraut 2011;Sniderman et al 2004;Valentino and Iyengar 2011;Brader et al 2008) and investigate how and why an additional, moralistic motivation overrides these factors when it comes to illegal immigration.…”

“…Most survey experiments exploring immigration attitudes randomly vary only one or two attributes at a time using vignettes or short characterizations (e.g. Brader et al 2008;Hainmueller and Hiscox 2010;Hopkins 2013;Sniderman et al 2004;Valentino and Iyengar 2011). Conjoint analysis, however, exposes subjects to numerous randomly varied immigrant characteristics simultaneously, and this permits us to disentangle the independent influence of each .…”

La representación de los personajes inmigrantes en los programas de ficción

“…En la segunda se mantiene una predilección por una variedad de "problemas" de los cuales son acusados los inmigrantes (culpabilización de la víctima), y finalmente, en la tercera los medios toman preferencia por un pequeño conjunto de temas negativos (planteando la inmigración como invasión, ataque o amenaza y asociándola a violencia, terrorismo y/o desintegración social) (Muñiz e Igartua, 2004). medios de comunicación-han señalado que estos influyen en la percepción, las actitudes y las creencias que sobre la inmigración hay en el país receptor (Brader, Valentino y Suhay, 2008;Domke, McCoy y Torres, 1999;Igartua y Cheng, 2009;Igartua, Moral y Fernández, 2011). Una de las principales consecuencias de este tratamiento informativo es la creación y/o mantenimiento de determinados estereotipos 6 y prejuicios sobre los inmigrantes.…”

Migration and Multiculturalism

“…The differential impact of threat rhetoric as a function of the targeted immigrant group is illustrated in an experimental study by Brader, Valentino, and Suhay (2008) showing that when news reports on Latino immigrants emphasized the costs of immigration (i.e., material threat) instead of its benefits, White U.S. citizens supported reduction of immigration, preferred English-only laws, and requested information from anti-immigration groups. This was far less the case when European immigrants were featured in the reports.…”