Political Participation of Asian Immigrants in the U.S.: The Effects of Pre-Migration Learning and Post-Migration Exposure

• In Event: 30825 - Immigrant Political Participation

Abstract

What facilitates immigrants’ political participation in the new country? The literature offers two theories of immigrant adaptation to the new political system: transferability and exposure. The transferability view argues that immigrants’ previous political learnings in their home country influence their political participation in the host country. In contrast, the exposure view argues that the longer immigrants are in the host society, the more they adapt to the new political system. This paper investigates how pre-migration learning and post-migration exposure influence the voting participation of Asian immigrants in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. This paper attempts to advance the theoretical understanding of how pre- and post-migration political experiences interact to influence immigrant political participation. Asian immigrants are a great case as they migrate from countries with a range of political systems that can be very dissimilar to the American political system, and their rapid growth (currently the fastest-growing immigrant group) raises an important question about their political adaptation to the American political system. This paper finds that (1) Asian immigrants from more democratic countries were more likely to vote in the 2016 presidential election than their counterparts from more autocratic countries; (2) Asian immigrants’ probability of voting increases as they spend a greater proportion of their life in the U.S.; (3) the effect of previous political regime strengthens as the proportion of life spent in the U.S. increases. Initially, Asian immigrants from more democratic background have similar voting probabilities to those from more autocratic background. However, as they spend a greater proportion of their life in the U.S., the voting pattern diverges: while those from more democratic background become increasingly more likely to vote over time, those from more autocratic background become less likely to vote.

Author

• Yanming Kuang, Indiana University-Bloomington