State Legislators’ Responsiveness to Undocumented Immigrants

• In Event: Race and Ethnicity in the Legislature

Abstract

There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. To what extent do state legislators represent these residents? In this study we test the responsiveness of state legislators to varying subgroups of constituents. To disentangle the effects of race and citizenship status, we conduct a field experiment in 44 U.S. state legislatures. Each legislator received a non-electoral constituent request that was identical in content, but varied the constituent’s identity (a Latino undocumented immigrant, an European undocumented immigrant, a Latino citizen, an Eastern European-American citizen, and a control not mentioning ethnicity or status). We find legislators’ responsiveness to undocumented constituents sharply declines regardless of their ethnicity, and responsiveness to both the Latino and Eastern European-origin citizen treatments is statistically the same. We demonstrate that the electoral reward associated with citizenship leads to equal representation for Latino and Eastern European-origin Americans, while presenting limited electoral incentive to respond to an undocumented immigrant of any race or ethnicity. The findings suggest important consequences for the representation of minority groups in the United States.

Author

• Sara Sadhwani, Pomona College