Relative Import Exposure, Immigration Backlash, and U.S. Elections

• In Event: Federalism and Policymaking

Abstract

Economic anxiety and immigration are two of the most powerful forces in contemporary electoral politics. Yet we know little about how relative economic displacement — not just absolute hardship — drives anti-immigrant sentiment and political backlash. We draw on group-position theory, which predicts that when native-born workers fall behind foreign-born workers economically within the same labor market, this triggers status threat. Status threat, in turn, shapes how people perceive the economy and view immigrants. But we argue that status threat alone is not enough to produce political backlash. That requires elite activation: partisan politicians must link economic grievance to immigration. Where immigration rhetoric is neither hostile nor partisan, we expect no electoral effect. Where it is both, relative displacement should push voters toward the protectionist party.We test this using trade and Census data aggregated to the commuting zone level from 2000 to 2024. We construct a nativity gap in import exposure — the difference in how native-born and foreign-born workers experience the same local China trade shock — and estimate its effects using a shift-share instrumental variable design. Drawing on geo-coded ANES data, we find that a larger nativity gap worsens economic perceptions, increases anti-immigrant sentiment, and shifts party identification and vote choice toward Republicans, even controlling for overall import exposure. In presidential elections, a larger gap reduces Democratic vote share. The gap effect is concentrated among low-skill workers; high-skill workers show no significant response, consistent with a status-threat rather than individual job-competition mechanism.However, the electoral effects are absent before 2012 and grow substantially thereafter. They are largest in media markets impacted by Sinclair Broadcasting takeovers and in areas exposed to more polarized congressional immigration speech. Hostile Republican rhetoric amplifies the gap effect on vote choice, while Democratic rhetoric attenuates it — a pattern that holds across both governor State of the State addresses and congressional speech data. Our findings suggest that relative economic displacement triggers status threat, but elite political activation is what converts that threat into electoral backlash.

Author

• Daniel B. Jones, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author