Do Anti-immigrant Laws Shape Public Sentiment? A Study of Arizona’s SB 1070 Using Twitter Data

• In Event: 198 - Regular Session. Immigration Politics

Abstract

In 2010, Arizona approved SB 1070, a controversial law that required local authorities to verify the documentation of individuals suspected of being undocumented and made it a crime to transport, harbor, or conceal unauthorized immigrants. Migration scholars have theorized that punitive measures like SB 1070 not only reflect the hardening of public opinion about immigration, but could also negatively affect people’s sentiments towards immigrants. However, such contention has not been assessed systematically. Using sentiment analysis and a difference-in-difference estimation technique to analyze more than 250,000 tweets published in Arizona and Nevada in 2010, I find that the implementation of SB 1070 had a significant negative impact on the sentiment of messages regarding immigrants posted by Twitter users in Arizona. Further, though the bill’s supporters argued that the law only targeted unauthorized immigrants, I find that the law also negatively shaped public sentiment towards Mexicans and, more generally, towards Hispanics. In contrast, the bill did not affect public discourse on Asian immigrants or African-Americans. However, these changes in public discourse were not caused by changing attitudes toward immigrants but by mobilizing users who were already critical of immigrants and motivating a new group of users to begin posting messages about immigrants.

Author

• Rene Flores, University of Michigan