Immigrant Community Legislators and Embedded Representation Practices

• In Event: Race and Ethnicity in the Legislature

Abstract

As immigrant communities continue to drive population growth in the United States, the necessity of developing understandings of the policy process that center the immigrant experience grows more urgent. In this project, we utilize an intersectional research framework to examine the substantive impact of legislators from immigrant-based communities: How do legislators’ intersectional identities tied to gender and immigrant-community membership interact with party and legislative institutions? We address these questions with an analysis of state legislative policymaking, which highlights the ways in which representatives’ overlapping and mutually constitutive identities enact distinct political processes. Specifically, we draw on in-depth interviews with 65 Asian American and Latina/o state legislators collected during national conferences in 2019 in order to examine how immigrant women and men’s identities inform their social and political positioning within legislative institutions, and strategies for representing the groups they understand to be their constituents. We analyze this qualitative data alongside a unique dataset encompassing all sponsored bills, as well as district and legislator demographic data for all sitting legislators from 2014-2017.
Our findings are three-fold, and represent important extensions of, as well as departures from, the extant literature on minority substantive representation and women’s substantive representation. First, we find that Asian American women and Latinas tend to view themselves as representatives who are “embedded” in particular and multidimensional communities, and that this is much more consistently the case among Latinas and Asian American women than among Latinos and Asian American men. Second, Asian American women and Latinas perform social and political labor in advancing their interests that is distinct from the policymaking strategies described by co-racial men. Third, while immigrant communities were often salient to female and male legislators, their policy strategies for addressing those communities’ specific needs rarely engaged explicit immigration or immigrant-related policies. These findings contribute to ongoing debates over the connection between descriptive and substantive representation, and speak directly to the literatures on minority and women’s substantive representation and immigrant political incorporation.

Authors

• Christian Dyogi Phillips, University of Southern California

• Paru Shah, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee