The Immigrant at the Next Desk vs. Next Door: Contact in Childhood and Adulthood

• In Event: Poster Session: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Abstract

How do attitudes towards immigration form? A well-studied answer to this question is the contact hypothesis – intergroup attitudes are derived from intergroup contact – but a less examined aspect of this framework is lifecycle effects. In this paper, I examine how variation in opportunities for contact with immigrants in both childhood and adulthood affect adults' attitudes towards immigration. Using a dataset derived from US census data from 1900 to 2018, I estimate the average exposure to immigrants for each age and demographic group in each state during childhood and the present. I use this to analyze how ANES respondents' preferences towards immigration relate to the immigration contexts in which they grew up and currently reside. I find that growing up in areas with larger foreign-born populations, particularly during elementary school, is associated with more open attitudes towards immigration. On the other hand, living in areas with larger foreign-born populations in adulthood is associated with more restrictive attitudes towards immigration, especially for respondents who grew up in a low immigrant context. I posit that this effect can be explained by the fact that childhood serves as a critical period for social attitude formation and that children have less ability than adults to be selective in their social interactions, leading to more positive contact between native- and foreign-born children and less among adults.

Author

• Alexander Rossell Hayes, University of California, Los Angeles