Red and Blue Immigrants: Political (Mis)Alignment, Immigration Attitudes, and the Boundaries of American National Inclusion

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Attitudes Toward Immigration

Abstract

Americans today express deeply polarized attitudes towards immigration, and by extension, the boundaries of U.S. national membership. Conventional wisdom suggests that Democrats uphold an inclusionary ethos that emphasizes human rights and egalitarianism, while Republicans embrace exclusionary norms characterized by racial and nativist bias. This paper innovates by investigating an emergent question: Are Americans’ attitudes towards immigration informed by perceptions of newcomers’ politics? I draw on a unique, pre-registered survey with a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens and uncover several key findings. First, Americans maintain a multifaceted view of immigrants as future Democrats who are culturally right-wing, with important heterogeneity in these perceptions across the evaluator’s partisan identity and across ten evaluated immigrant groups. Notably, Republicans perceive continued immigration as an existential threat to their electoral power, revealing a crucial undercurrent in the historically unprecedented partisan divide over immigration. Moreover, I find that manipulating the partisan composition of immigrants has a substantive causal effect on Americans’ attitudes towards newcomers: As the proportion of Republican immigrants increases, Democratic support for immigration collapses, while Republican opposition diminishes. Supplementary analyses suggest this effect cannot be explained away by the perceived cultural and economic impact of (mis)aligned immigrants. These findings pose key implications for the interdisciplinary literature on immigration attitudes and national boundaries.

Author

• Keitaro Okura, Yale University