Authoritarianism, Race and Attitudes towards Migrants in Transit Countries

• In Event: Anti-immigrant Sentiment, Xenophobia, and Nativism

Abstract

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from Central American and Caribbean countries have headed north fleeing violence and poor economic conditions in their home countries. Migration provides immense benefits and opportunities for the migrants, host communities, and communities of origin, it continues to spark heated debates and important economic, social, and political challenges in recipient, as well as transit countries. Extant research on this area has enlightened our understanding on the trends and roots of this phenomenon (see e.g., Meyer 2022; Blyde et al 2020) as well as its economic and social impacts (Figlio and Ozek 2019; Contreras and Gallardo 2020a, 2020b; Masri and Vargas-Silva 2020). Recently, researchers have also looked at how ethnic and geographic context shapes attitudes towards immigrants (Knoll 2012; Cortina 2019). But we still know little about the attitudes towards migrants in transit and temporary countries. This study has two primary goals. First, it assesses how and why polarizing messages on immigration affect co-ethnic citizens’ attitudes towards migrants in Mexico and the United States. Our second objective is to understand how and why the interaction between authoritarianism, race, and different messages affect immigration attitudes. We use an experiment to test how respondents react to different messages about migrants, using a 2 (message sponsor)*3(economic benefits, economic threat, security threat) design. We are particularly interested in how authoritarianism and race variables (self-identification and racial resentment) mediate the treatment effects. Our main hypotheses are tested on convenience samples using Lin estimators (Lin 2013) and CATEs analysis (Hainmueller and Hazlet 2014; Grimmer et al. 2017; Künzel et al. 2019).

Authors

• Sergio Bejar, San Jose State U. & CIDE-Mexico

• Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Bowdoin College