Cleavages between Races-Ethnicities Explain Variation Toward Immigration Issues: Long-term Solutions and Worker Solidarity

• In Event: 242 - Section on International Migration Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 14. Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

Scholars continue to write about the benefits and burdens of immigrants in the United States, helping Americans in civil society engage in debates about immigration. My principal question in this research paper centers on how Americans perceive immigrants by race-ethnicity, asking whether Americans, who tend to disagree with individually structured solutions to inequality, favor immigrant issues, and those, who tend to disagree with socially structured solutions to inequality, oppose immigration issues. The main goal is to explain racial and ethnic variation in the degree of support or opposition to welcoming immigrants, immigrants taking jobs from Americans (economic threat), and the control of illegal immigration as an important policy goal. I construct measures that tap socially and individually structured solutions to inequality from a series of four questions asked in the 2004 American National Election Survey. This is not a typical liberal versus conservative measure, but it focuses on what Americans think about the poverty of African Americans. I found two cleavages. First, there is cleavage between liberal whites and African Americans, which may be explained by social position. Second, there is cleavage between Hispanic Americans and whites, suggesting that Hispanic Americans have a “dialectical dilemma”, seeking to be loyal to the socio-economic system dominated by whites, yet seek to be loyal to immigrants. Long-term solutions for immigration reform include addressing greater worker unity through increased unionization, with a focus on how to ameliorate these two cleavages among liberals.

Author

• Paul S. Kasun, University of Texas-Austin