Mexican Americans’ Immigration Attitudes: A Generational and Cohort-based Examination

• In Event: 065 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Latinidades: Intersectional Identities in the 21st Century

Abstract

This article extends current understandings about U.S. Latinos’ political position on the immigration debate through an analysis of later-generation Mexican Americans’ immigration attitudes. Drawing on a unique dataset that allows us to differentiate Mexican Americans by generation and birth cohort, we find that ethnic and national attachment variables are the most consistent predictors of liberalism and restrictionism, respectively. In specific, attitudes toward bilingualism and the importance of English wield some of the strongest effects for all respondents, although there are some important cross-cohort differences we discuss in the paper. Notably, the predictive effect of generational status (a major indicator of assimilation) diminishes over time—a finding that contradicts the common assumption that Latinos’ immigration attitudes get more restrictionist with each generation until they reach parity with whites. Overall, our findings highlight that to understand how anti-immigrant hostility affects U.S. Latinos, researchers must consider a wider range of temporal indicators (other than generation-from-immigration), a more nuanced understanding of race, ethnicity, and national identity, and be more intentional about recruiting adequate samples of later-generation Latinos.

Authors

• Irene I. Vega, University of California-Los Angeles

• Vilma Ortiz, University of California-Los Angeles