Immigration and Party-Line Voting in State Legislatures

• In Event: Parties and Leaders in US State Legislatures

Abstract

Two or three decades ago, immigration was not seen as an issue that cut neatly across legislative party lines. By contrast, Republican legislators today almost uniformly favor restrictive policies while Democratic legislators offer near unanimous support for pro-immigrant policies. Does party-line voting on immigration reflect the demographic composition of legislators’ districts? Or is it indicative of intensified ideological framing of immigrant policies? Or perhaps it indicates the prevalence of non-competitive legislative districts? State legislatures—where, unlike the US Congress, immigrant-related roll call votes occur relatively frequently—offer a unique venue to test rival hypotheses about the conditions promoting partisan division over immigration. The analysis in this paper is based on an original dataset of party-line voting on two key immigrant policies at the state level—policies banning “sanctuary cities” and those granting in-state tuition status to undocumented high school graduates. The votes of legislators who voted against the majority of their party on each of the two policies are aggregated across states, providing a sufficiently large sample to test rival hypotheses concerning the sources of party line voting. For each of the two policies, a hypothetical legislative chamber is created that contains a random sample from each state of legislators who voted with their party’s majority along with the legislators who crossed the party line. The findings in this paper, part of a larger project on the determinants of state immigrant policies, provide a novel, empirically-based window into the forces generating the growing partisan stalemate over immigration at both the state and national level.

Author

• Gary M. Reich, University of Kansas