Latinx Resentment of Immigrants & Support for Trump/Restrictive Immigration

• In Event: Latinxs in the 2020 Presidential Election

Abstract

While it remains to be seen whether Latinx support for Donald Trump increased in 2020, it is clear that he has enjoyed similar levels of support among Latinx voters as past Republican candidates despite advocating for some of the most restrictive immigration policies in recent memory and relying on deeply offensive rhetoric against this community. Our previous work draws upon Social Identity Theory to demonstrate that support for Donald Trump and restrictive immigration policies are powerfully motivated by a desire to distinguish oneself from a stigmatized Latinx social group by prioritizing their “American” identity. However, for individuals that regard “passing” as impossible or undesirable, they may alternatively seek to improve their status through “Social Creativity”: engaging in inter-group comparisons that serve to elevate one subgroup over another. As such, we posit that an important subset of the Latinx community is resentful of more recent waves of immigrants for exacerbating negative stereotypes about the broader Latinx community – and that support for Donald Trump and restrictive immigration policies is a means of solidifying those subgroup distinctions. After controlling for a range of standard covariates and alternative explanations, our novel measure of Latinx Resentment of Immigrants confirms these expectations through a survey of 1250 Latinx in the US.

This project evaluates a novel measure of Latinx resentment towards immigrants and demonstrates its conceptual validity and predictive power for attitudes towards Donald Trump and Restrictive Immigration Politics.

Authors

• Flavio R. Hickel, Washington College

• Loren Collingwood, UC Riverside

• Kassra AR Oskooii, University of Delaware