Crossing the Colorline: How Race affects Views of Immigration Law Enforcement

• In Event: Race and Public Policy

Abstract

Are attitudes toward undocumented immigration and its enforcement conditional on the perceived race/ethnicity of the offender? Much of the work on immigration attitudes and race focuses on how an individual’s legal status and/or country of origin inform attitudes towards immigrants and immigration policy. However, few works investigate how race and legal status inform perceptions of immigration law enforcement and deportation. This article offers important insights into how immigrants’ race and legal status work in tandem to inform perceptions of immigration law enforcement as well as other, broader immigrations attitudes. Using an experimental test, we manipulate the race and legal status of an individual to isolate the influence each characteristic has on these attitudes. The implications of this research inform our understandings of policy preferences and attitudes as well as understandings of perceptions of law enforcement’s role in immigration.

Authors

• David Cortez, University of Notre Dame

• Julian Wamble, Stony Brook University