Americans’ Support for Immigrant-Family Separation

• In Event: Experimental Approaches to Immigration Backlash Politics

Abstract

Supporters of aggressive immigration-enforcement policies often claim that what motivates their stance is unlawful immigrants’ disrespect for the law. Many of these restrictionists support immigration, they say, so long as it is done legally. We present findings from the first survey experiment to test this claim empirically. That is, we determine how citizens’ support for the recent U.S. policy of separating would-be immigrant children from their families is affected by information about the legality of that policy, and of the asylum-seekers themselves. The policy is generally unpopular among U.S. citizens, but unsurprisingly, a majority of Trump voters support the policy. More interestingly, whether the migrants are characterized as coming lawfully or unlawfully has no significant effect on people’s attitudes toward the policy. In contrast, citizens who are told the family-separation policy violates the Constitution are slightly less likely (though at statistically insignificant levels) to support migrant-family separation, but those who are told that it violates international law are significantly more likely to support the family-separation policy. These findings lend support to the notion that attributes of immigrants and immigration other than legality are motivating certain citizens’ opposition to them. In doing so, our findings refute a common narrative in current policy debates over unlawful immigration.

Authors

• Kevin Cope, University of Virginia

• Charles David Crabtree, Dartmouth College