Experimental Approaches to Immigration Backlash Politics

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

Experimental methods are a helpful tool in unravelling complex questions of causality. In migration studies, questions of anti-immigrant backlashes are often complicated by issues of endogeneity. When and why do backlashes occur, what conditions reinforce xenophobic attitudes, and what might soften them? The papers in this panel use a variety of experimental methods, including survey and field experiments, to examine these questions regarding attitudes toward immigration, undocumented status, deportation, and family separation in the U.S. and in Sweden.

Sub Unit

• Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

Individual Presentations

• Americans’ Support for Immigrant-Family Separation - Kevin Cope, University of Virginia; Charles David Crabtree, Dartmouth College

• A New Threat: Political Competition, Partisanship, and Anti-Immigrant Backlash - Louis Jacob Wilson, University of Pittsburgh

• Undocumented Immigrants and Support for Deportation - John Doces, Bucknell University; Beth Elise Whitaker, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Chair

• Elizabeth Iams Wellman Williams College

Discussant

• Elizabeth Iams Wellman Williams College