Mexican Americans and Immigration Attitudes: A Cohort Analysis of Assimilation and Group Consciousness (original) (raw)
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2019
The historic and primarily Latino 2006 immigrant rights protest wave occurred in response to proposed federal anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437). Research on the unprecedented series of demonstrations suggests that the draconian and racialized nature of the bill helps explain why it incited large-scale collective action. Utilising a new survey with a considerable oversample of Latino respondents, the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), this paper investigates the role that collective identities, racialisation, and social networks play in Latino support for contemporary immigrant rights activism. To do so, we incorporate measures such as linked fate, perceptions of anti-immigrant sentiments, knowing undocumented people, and concerns about immigration enforcement policies. The results of our analysis indicate that some of the same factors that influenced Latino engagement in the 2006 mobilisations, such as identity and racialisation, concerns over enforcement, and social networks, continue to impact Latino support for contentious politics on behalf of the foreign-born. We also find evidence that political party and past protest activity, play a significant role in explaining levels of support for activism. Our results have important implications for understanding how anti-immigrant policies and racialized nativism influence Latino support for contentious politics.
2014
influence of Latino and Asian American populations is a truism. What is perhaps less acknowledged, but also increasingly clear is that debates over U.S. immigration policy (and Congressional and Executive inaction and posturing) are shaping the politics of Latino and Asian American communities for the next generation. In this paper, I examine the factors that shape Latino and Asian American attitudes toward U.S. immigration policy with a particular eye to whether generational differences in Latino and Asian American communities predict different preferred outcomes of the national debate on immigration policy. This generational question is one that will take on increasing influence in coming years as the children and grandchildren of today's immigrants make up a larger and larger share of these populations. Although it is not the focus of this paper, it is worth observing that immigration policy has taken on a increasingly salient role in shaping the political behavior and candidate choices of Latinos and Asian Americans. While immigration policy has rarely topped the political agenda for either of these communities, opinion polls demonstrate that its salience has steadily increased over the past twenty years. Recent periods of focused challenge to the status of immigrants in the United States have seen surges in Latino and Asian American naturalization and higher than average increases in Asian American and Latino voting. This period has also seen a steady shift in the Asian American vote from majority support for Republicans to equally large support for the Democrats. Latinos have maintained their support for the Democrats throughout this period; their margin of support for the Democrats increases, however, in periods when immigration debates are more salient and decreases somewhat when immigration policy declines in salience. The focus of Latino civil rights organizations has also steadily shifted to questions of immigration policy and the rights of immigrants and the children of immigrants (regardless of their place of birth). This paper will speak to three sets of scholarly questions. First, it will examine predictors of attitudes toward immigration policies in the contemporary debate among Latinos and Asian Americans. Second, it will assess whether there are predictable differences in these attitudes across immigrant generations. Finally, it will compare Latino and Asian American attitudes. As will be evident, the surveys that I rely on ask different questions about immigration policy outcomes, so the comparison will not be as clean as I would like. This cross-pan-ethnic group comparison is, nevertheless, absent in much of the scholarship, but necessary to better understand the likely future directions of U.S. politics. Political Changes Across Immigrant Generations The political significance of immigrant generation, rather than simply contrasting immigrants to natives, is a topic that has generated theoretical insights that have, for the most part, not been able to be rigorously tested in civic and political research. Most of these theories of immigrant political change across generations emerged late in the period of turn-of the-Twentieth Century migration. By the time these theories appeared (largely in the 1950s and 1960s), there was only a limited first generation (people born abroad) and the "immigrant-stock" population included a mix of second (U.S.-born children of CSD Center for the Study of Democracy
Journal of race, ethnicity, and politics, 2017
Immigrant sentiment, measured by the number of state laws enacted to curb the flow of undocumented immigration or expand rights to immigrants, have been on a steady incline since September 11, 2001. Despite the increased attention to unauthorized immigration, little research has examined how immigrant policies are affecting group identity (i.e., linked fate). Linked fate is a form of collective group identity that develops when a group of people experience discrimination and marginalization. Using a unique database that merges the 2012 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (n = 934 Latinos) with the sum of state-level immigration policies enacted from 2005 to 2012, this study is the first to examine the direct relationship between immigrant climate and linked fate. Results from our multinomial logistic regressions indicate that the linked fate among Latinos increases as the number of punitive immigration laws in a state increases, controlling for a vector of control variables. Consistent with our theory regarding differential impact, our findings also suggest that immigration
Restrictive Immigration Policies and Latino Immigrant Identity in the United States
2009
The United States is presently characterized by rising anti-immigrant sentiment, repressive immigration enforcement, and the negative framing of Latinos as threatening and undesirable. As a result, social boundaries between immigrants and natives have hardened and boundary crossing has become more difficult. Under these circumstances, the prediction of classical assimilation theory is turned on its head: the more time that immigrants spend in the United States and the more contact they have with Americans and American society, the more aware they become of the harsh realities of prejudice and discrimination and the more they come to experience the rampant inequalities of the secondary labor market. Rather than ideologically assimilating, therefore, the greater their experience in the United States, the more likely immigrants are to express a reactive ethnicity that rejects the label “American.” Our work suggests that the greatest threat to the successful assimilation of immigrants c...
Conservative Rationales, Racial Boundaries: A Case Study of Restrictionist Mexican Americans
The 2006 immigration marches have become emblematic of Latinos’ united position on immigration. However, solidarity and collective action is only one group formation outcome of sociopolitical exclusion. By ignoring those Latinos who disrupt the tenet of ethnic solidarity against immigration restriction, research has failed to specify the mechanisms that lead some Latinos to depart from their own on a racially bifurcated debate. Drawing on interviews, I document the boundary-making strategies that Mexican-origin Latinos who are “anti-illegal immigration” deploy to formulate us and them groupings vis-à-vis immigrants. I show that respondents are politically conservative, highly nationalistic, and express a sense of nostalgia for “the past” in broad terms. They differentiate “us” from “them” in terms of national membership, distinguishing those who are deserving of the material and symbolic resources of the nation-state from those who are outsiders. Because they share racial/ethnic markers with immigrants, they engage in boundary-making strategies to split the Latino/Hispanic panethnic category from the Mexican national-origin category, thereby differentiating us (Americans) from them (foreigners). They deploy multicultural discourse that establishes the compatibility of national loyalties and ethnic affinities to reconcile their background with their political position.
The United States is presently characterized by rising anti-immigrant sentiment, repressive immigration enforcement, and the negative framing of Latinos as threatening and undesirable. As a result, social boundaries between immigrants and natives have hardened and boundary crossing has become more difficult. Under these circumstances, the prediction of classical assimilation theory is turned on its head: the more time that immigrants spend in the United States and the more contact they have with Americans and American society, the more aware they become of the harsh realities of prejudice and discrimination and the more they come to experience the rampant inequalities of the secondary labor market. Rather than ideologically assimilating, therefore, the greater their experience in the United States, the more likely immigrants are to express a reactive ethnicity that rejects the label "American." Our work suggests that the greatest threat to the successful assimilation of immigrants comes not from foreign involvements or transnational loyalties, but from the rejection, exclusion, and discrimination that immigrants experience in the United States.
Divided Loyalties? Understanding Variation in Latino Attitudes Toward Immigration*
2010
Objective. In this article, we develop and test a model of competing theoretical explanations of Latino attitudes toward immigration; specifically examining their policy preferences on legal immigration, illegal immigration, and a proposed policy for dealing with illegal immigrants. We also consider whether Latino attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration are related and comprise a single coherent structure. Method.
Latino Americans have to navigate involvement and identification with two cultural groups—their ethnic culture and the dominant American culture. Differences in cultural identifications have been found to correlate with political affiliation and attitudes toward acculturation. Using a sample of U.S.-born Mexican Americans, we examined several correlates of political ideology including the strength of identification with both Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, acculturation attitudes, and socioeconomic status (SES). Strength of Mexican identity, stronger integration acculturation attitudes, weaker assimilation attitudes, and lower SES were associated with holding a more liberal political ideology. Furthermore, we found that integration acculturation attitudes mediated and SES moderated the relationship between Mexican identification and political ideology. These findings suggest that political campaigns should be mindful of differences in cultural identifications and acculturation attitudes when addressing their Latino constituents.
"Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race" - A Review
In 1992, boxes of questionnaires used in a mid-1960s household survey of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio were accidentally discovered by construction workers at UCLA. Those files would form the basis for a unique follow-up study, entailing a multiyear detective effort to locate and reinterview the original respondents who had been surveyed three decades before, and now also a sample of their grown children. The analyses follow an intergenerational longitudinal design: the original respondents were first, second, or third generation adults; their children were second, third, or fourth generations. The parents had gone to school between the 1930s and 1950s, the children between the 1950s and 1980s. The book poses a key question: are social (ethnic and racial) boundaries between Mexican Americans and other groups, especially dominant Anglos, enhanced or eroded over time and generation-since-immigration? Mexican immigrants see themselves as different: they speak Spanish, live in segregated barrios, have distinct political views. But for their descendants, what happens to those ethnic boundaries? Do they persist, blur, or disappear? In sharp contrast to assumptions of linear progress underlying conventional assimilation perspectives, the authors find that educational attainment peaks among second-generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations (the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants). Similarly, economic progress halts by the second generation — education was the only variable to consistently explain variation in the socioeconomic status of Mexican Americans. Poverty rates remained high for later generations. On the other hand, evidence of acculturation was strong on several indicators, above all language, with English spoken well by the second generation and Spanish becoming nearly extinct after the fourth. Despite the decline of Spanish, ethnic identification persists into the fourth generation, with the lion’s share of respondents preferring Mexican, Mexican American and Hispanic identity labels over American — an outcome that the authors attribute in part to “racialization experiences.” The authors identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Poorly funded school systems where Mexican American children are concentrated, punitive immigration policies coincident with reliance on cheap Mexican labor in key states, and persistent discrimination all combine to make integration problematic. In these respects, the Mexican American trajectory differs from that of European immigrants in previous generations.
Latino Ethnicity and Other Influences on the Immigrants’Rights Movement in the United States
American Studies, 2008
This paper describes the social movement for immigrants' rights, which organized massive street demonstrations on May 1 of 2006 and 2007. The protest movement, which demands the rights of undocumented migrants in the United States, could be portrayed as an ethnic movement for the civil rights of Latinos. However, quotations taken from the protesters show that on the day of the protest they did not see themselves as demanding freedom from discrimination as members of an ethnic or racial group, Rather, they argued that as persons living in the territory governed by the U.S. government, they submit to its laws and proclaim their loyalty to the U.S. polity, and hence feel it is their right to remain in the U.S. The widespread opposition to political proposals for the legalization of "illegal immigrants" is based on the popular notion that they cannot or will not assimilate to American social and cultural norms. However, this nativist nationalist discourse is shown to be false by the case of the so-called "green card soldiers." The non-citizen soldiers who serve in the U.S. military illustrate non-citizens' deep affirmation of commitment and loyalty to the U.S. polity. Like the May 1 protesters, the immigrants in the military seek to affirm their commitment to the U.S.A., in spite of their cultural and class differences that bar their entry into the American mainstream.