When Do Parents Think It Is Ok To Separate Other People’s Children?

• In Event: Politicizing the Immigrant Experience

Abstract

The motivation for this project is to ask which individuals are likely to support what many have called a morally questionable policy. In 2017 the Trump Administration implemented a “zero-tolerance” policy against those who irregularly crossed the border, which resulted in separating children from their migrant parents at the US border. Initially there was a lot of outrage in the media about the policy and whether the United States was the type of place that allows such a thing to occur. Eventually, the anger subsided, and the policy remained mostly intact. The power of partisan identity is well known; therefore, this project tests the impact of partisanship on support for the child separation policy. However, this project attempts to tell more than a typical partisan story. This project examines whether parental identity, which has been shown to be influential (Klar 2013), can affect policy evaluations surrounding the child separation policy. A 2 X 2 experimental design using a nationally representative sample from the 2019 CCES data that not only primes partisan identity, but parental identity is implemented to test whether parental identity has a more significant impact on the evaluations of the child separation policy compared to partisan identity. This paper hypothesizes that parents will be the least tolerant of the child separation policy regardless of whether it is presented in partisan terms or not. Additionally, the project makes use of the Moral Foundation's battery to identify whether morality serves as a mediator when it comes to supporting or opposing the “zero-tolerance” child separation policy. While this paper hypothesizes that parents will be the least tolerant of the child separation policy regardless of whether it is presented in partisan terms or not, it also speculates those who score high on the Moral Foundation's battery will be more likely to support the child separation policy regardless of their parental status.

Author

• Roberto Carlos, University of Georgia