Threatened American Identity & Hostile Immigration Attitudes in the United States

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

By, Allyson F. Shortle, B.A. Graduate Program in Political Science

The Ohio State University 2012

Dissertation Committee: Paul A. Beck (Advisor) Thomas E. Nelson Eric L. McDaniel Irfan Nooruddin

©Copyright by Allyson F. Shortle 2012

i

Abstract

This dissertation asks why Americans tend to express hostile immigration policy attitudes. Specifically, I ask why citizens are willing to voice hostility toward policies that implicate illegal immigrants, while they are unwilling to voice hostile attitudes toward policies that implicate legal immigrants. Current explanations offer some insights into these puzzling patterns of hostility, with some citing symbolic factors and others arguing that material factors are at the center of public opinion about immigration.

However, research thus far has failed to demonstrate a consistent effect arising from any one factor, especially in offering an explanation for the disproportionate amount of hostility that exists within attitudes toward policies meant to punish and restrict illegal immigrants. I argue that current research lacks a focus upon the relevant factors that can explain the vast amount of hostility within the current policies of today, which implicate illegal immigrants. I contend that hostile immigration policy attitudes are caused primarily by threats to American identity. Individuals feel that immigrants devalue

American identity when immigrants receive favorable treatment without demonstrating

i that they place positive value on and are attached to American identity. The disproportionate amount of hostility toward illegal immigrants is explained by the fact that citizens react negatively to immigrants they perceive do not demonstrate attachment, by residing in the country illegally.

I test this theory drawing on two original, national surveys (N=400 & N=1273).

The surveys first provide a wide array of questions about personal attachment to the nation. These questions confirm that individuals are highly attached to the nation, and hold the necessary personal attachment to the nation to make threats to American identity possible. The surveys next provide numerous questions about perceived immigrant

(non)attachment to the nation. These questions confirm that citizens do question the attachment of illegal immigrants, particularly in their level of wanting and demonstrating loyalty to America. I find strong evidence to suggest that both personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment drive hostile immigration attitudes, particularly toward policies that implicate illegal immigrants. Finally, I find strong evidence of an interactive effect of both factors upon hostility. Considered together, these results suggest that threats to American identity are in fact the main determinants of whether an individual is willing to voice a hostile immigration attitude.

ii

To my mother, Brenda, for your unwavering support and sacrifice.

To my husband and closest friend, Lee.

iii

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the help I have received over the years to make this project possible. First, I thank my committee members, Paul Allen Beck, Eric L. McDaniel,

Thomas Nelson, and Irfan Nooruddin. I thank Paul Beck for consistently providing me with advice about my dissertation, as well as important guidance about my career in general. I thank you for the patience you have shown me, and allowing me to benefit from your insights. I also thank Eric McDaniel for his mentorship throughout this process. Thank you for allowing me to collaborate on research with you, listening to my ideas, and giving me constructive feedback. I owe much gratitude to Thomas Nelson, who was kind enough to allow me to collaborate on research early on during my graduate studies. He was also a large part of the reason that I was drawn to political psychology and public opinion in the first place, and was instrumental in my training while at OSU.

Thank you for your support and guidance, Tom. Finally, I would like to thank Irfan

Nooruddin for his vital role in shaping my intellectual development. As a teacher and mentor, Irfan has challenged me, in addition to presenting me with opportunities to conduct interesting research, and providing me with invaluable advice about my work and career. While I do not think there is enough appreciation I could ever pay you for the time and effort you have put into helping me, consider this the portion of gratitude that will be microfilmed. Thank you, friend.

iv I would also like to thank several other faculty members who helped me along the way while I was at OSU. First, I would like to thank Harwood McClerking for playing a huge role in the development of my ideas while in graduate school. Harwood’s advice was invaluable, and I am very grateful to have benefitted from his mentorship early on in my graduate studies. In addition, I would like to thank Craig Volden for providing me with advice about the job market. Finally, I would like to thank Rick Herrmann for bringing to my attention the various opportunities to work with the Mershon Center for

International Studies. Due to his guidance, I was able to fund a portion of this dissertation, and I thank him for his support.

I was also very lucky to be surrounded by a wonderful group of friends while at

OSU. First, to Scott Powell and Dana Wittmer, who were my closest friends throughout my graduate school experience. There are too many memories to list, and I cherish them all. I especially miss our shared time during coffee breaks, travels near and far, and bacon themed parties. I am incredibly happy that we were able to go through this process together. I also feel grateful for my friendships with Sarah Wilson Sokhey, Anand

Sokhey, Quintin Beazer, Daniel Blake, Sarah Bryner, Dustin Carnahan and Dino

Christenson.

I am especially grateful to have an amazingly supportive husband, Lee, whose constant love, encouragement, and friendship continues to motivate me everyday. I am truly proud to be your wife. You are my closest family and friend.

Finally, I could not have accomplished anything had it not been for the immense inspiration of my mother, Brenda Shortle. I thank you, Mom, for always pushing me to pursue my goals and succeed in achieving them. I cannot be more grateful for the

v sacrifices you have made to make sure your children have a good life. Thank you for being the best role model in the world.

vi

Vita

January 1, 1983…………………………...... Born in Rutland, VT

2005…………………………………………...... B.A. in Political Science, Union College in Schenectady, NY

2005-2011………………………………………. Graduate Research Assistant, The Ohio State University

2011-present…………………………………….. Acting Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Oklahoma

Publications

McDaniel, Eric L., Irfan Nooruddin, and Allyson Shortle. 2011. “Divine Boundaries: How Religion Shapes Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants.” American Politics Research.

Nelson, Thomas, Dana Wittmer, and Allyson Shortle. 2009. “Value Recruitment in the Debate Over Teaching Evolution.” In Winning with Words: The Origins of Framing. Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers, Eds. New York: Routledge Press, pp. 11-40.

Fields of Study

Major Field of Study: American Politics

vii

Table of Contents

Abstract...... i Acknowledgements ...... iii Vita ...... vii Table of Contents...... viii

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... xii The Argument in Brief...... 4 Chapter Outline...... 8

Chapter 2: Threatened American Identity & Hostile Immigration Attitudes... 11 Introduction...... 11 The Rule of Law Questioned ...... 13 Disclaimer about Expressed & Latent Hostilities...... 15 Importance ...... 16 Organization...... 18 Historical Context of Immigrant Labels ...... 19 The Puzzle of the Hostility Disparity & the Anti-Illegal Fixation...... 22 Past Fixation on Legal Immigration ...... 24 Current Fixation on Illegal Immigration...... 26 Existing Explanations ...... 29 General limitations...... 31 Material...... 34 Improvement over Material ...... 39 Symbolic ...... 40 Improvement over Symbolic...... 45 Argument ...... 46 Social Identity Theoretical Frameworks...... 48 High Status Social Identities...... 51 Social Identity Threat...... 52 General Expectations ...... 60 Hypotheses...... 60 Looking Forward ...... 62

Chapter 3: The Impact of Personal Attachment to American Identity on Restrictive Policy Attitudes ...... 63

viii Personal Attachment & Threats to American Identity...... 64 Restricting Access to Medicaid & Food Stamps ...... 67 Hypotheses...... 69 Empirical Approach...... 69 Results...... 76 Multivariate Results...... 81 Discussion...... 88

Chapter 4: Testing the Mechanisms of Threatened American Identity on Support for Arizona’s SB 1070...... 91 Immigrant (Non)attachment...... 92 Arizona’s S.B. 1070...... 92 Hypotheses...... 95 The Data...... 96 Results...... 107 Multivariate Results...... 115 Discussion...... 120

Chapter 5: Explaining the Interactive Effect of Threatened American Identity Factors on Deportation Policy Preferences ...... 122 The Data...... 123 Results...... 130 Discussion...... 145

Chapter 6: Conclusion...... 148 Summary of Empirical Findings...... 149 Immigrants as Illegal...... 149 Threat from Personal Attachment...... 149 Threat from Perceived Immigrant (Non)attachment...... 151 Interaction of Threats to American Identity...... 152 Implications...... 154 Limitations ...... 157 Final Thoughts ...... 161

Works Cited...... 162

Appendix A: Summary Statistics 21st CAS (2004)- CH. 3 ...... 171

Appendix B: Summary Statistics YGP Survey (2010)- CH. 4 ...... 172

Appendix C: Summary Statistics- KN Survey (2010)- CH. 5...... 173

Appendix D: Support for Deportation, Ordered Probit ...... 174

ix

List of Tables

Table 1.1. Policy Attitudes by Immigrant Legal Status...... 6

Table 2.1 Individuals holding joint ‘anti-illegal’ and ‘pro-legal’ sentiments...... 28

Table 3.1: Pair-wise Correlation Matrix ...... 78

Table 3.2. Determinants of support for restricting immigrant access to medicaid..... 86

Table 4.1. Respondent Characteristics...... 98

Table 4.2. Approval for SB 1070...... 99

Table 4.3. Respondent Perceptions of Illegal Immigrant (Non)attachment ...... 101

Table 4.4. Respondent Perceptions of Naturalized Citizen Attachment...... 101

Table 4.5. Respondent Perceptions of Immigrant Threat (Disloyal)...... 102

Table 4.6. Personal attachment (Thinking of oneself as American)...... 103

Table 4.7. Personal attachment (Citizenship) ...... 103

Table 4.8. Pair-wise Correlation Matrix ...... 110

Table 4.9. Approval of Arizona SB 1070 ...... 113

Table 4.10. Predicted Probability of Support for Arizona’s SB1070 ...... 118

Table 5.1. Respondent Characteristics (compared to 2010 Census)...... 124

Table 5.2: Agreement with deportation policy ...... 126

Table 5.3: Threat from immigrant (non)attachment ...... 127 x

Table 5.4: Personal attachment to nation...... 128

Table 5.5. Pair-wise Correlation Matrix (2010 KN Survey) ...... 132

Table 5.5, continued...... 133

Table 5.6: Support for deporting illegal immigrants, OLS estimation ...... 136

xi

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Support for decreasing immigration, by immigrant legal status ...... 6 figure 5.1. Marginal effects of contsitutive terms...... 141

Figure 5.2. Interaction of threat factors (P value=0.00)...... 142

Figure 5.3. Conditional effect of immigrant (non)attachment on hostility, Across personal attachment...... 145

xii

Chapter 1: Introduction

Recent events and news media coverage of the immigration policy debate indicate visceral reactions to illegal immigrants throughout the United States. In particular, the public’s widespread support for several states’ extreme policy measures that were meant to curb illegal immigration has led to an outpouring of support for (and implementation of) restrictive deportation related measures by the Obama administration, and more recently by those vying for a spot on the Republican ticket in the upcoming presidential election. However, the immigration debate has taken the form of a back-and-forth about who can claim to be the toughest on illegal immigration, as opposed to a discussion about the merits of applying restrictive versus lenient treatments to migrants coming into

America. The result has been an absence of leniency or compassion in the discourse surrounding immigration. In contrast to the vast hostility toward undocumented immigrants however, the tendency in the 2010s has become for citizens to express favorable attitudes regarding legal immigrants. This paradoxical pattern exists within individual citizens as well, as most people who express hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants concurrently voice amicable opinions about legal immigrants (See Table 1.1).

Does this mean that people are now abiding by the ‘rule of law’ to shape their more restrictive opinions about immigration? Recent studies have found that individuals most likely imagine illegal immigrants when shaping preferences about immigration in general, which scholars have initially attributed to the ‘rule of law’ (Mayda 2009; 1 Ramakrishnan, Esterling, and Neblo 2010). However, there have currently been no direct tests of this hypothesis. Furthermore, little effort has been put into accounting for the fact that individuals are willing to freely express hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants while simultaneously unwilling to express hostile attitudes toward legal immigrants. The restrictive policy attitudes implicating illegal immigrants diverge from a previous focus of the public opinion literature. Surprisingly, many scholars have conceptualized hostile immigration attitudes as a function of images of legal immigrants; the reason was based on these immigrants’ ability to receive governmental services (i.e., public welfare assistance). As a result, most studies explained hostile immigration attitudes using popular racial and economic explanations derived from the literature on prejudice against

African Americans (Espenshade et al. 1996). Now that the public discusses immigration through a different rhetoric of illegal status, however, the question is whether these predictors are truly able to explain the evolving shape of immigration attitudes that exist today. Recent scholarship has been able to explain important roles for racial and economic factors in shaping general immigration attitudes, as well as attitudes that are supposed to implicate legal immigrants. However, these studies cannot account for the hostile policy attitudes of today, which implicate illegal immigrants specifically.

Additionally, the current research cannot account for the disparate reactions the public now expresses about illegal but not legal immigrants. In providing an answer to this puzzling hostility disparity, this dissertation will provide a more complete account of hostile immigration attitudes in the U.S.

I argue that citizens are willing to voice hostile opinions when they draw from their devotion to laws that pertain specifically to citizenship. My theory therefore draws

2 on the prevailing intuition about the ‘rule of law’ to posit theoretical expectations of national identity mechanisms. In brief, my Threatened American Identity (TAI) theory makes clear that expressed hostility is caused by threats to identity that occur when individuals feel this important social identity will be devalued. Illegal immigrants threaten devaluation because their illegal status is seen as an obvious sign of not wanting, demonstrating loyalty to, or generally placing value on American identity. Therefore, certain individuals will feel that allowing illegal immigrants to benefit from favorable treatment that citizens receive would lower the value of American identity since these immigrants are perceived to not recognize the value of the social group identity. In other words, many citizens feel a symbolic threat of cheapening the privileges of citizenship.

Legal immigrants could provoke the same threats of devaluation to national identity, since one could reasonably assume individuals also might think legal immigrants are

(non)attached. However, I argue that citizens are less likely to express these sentiments since legal immigrants are seen as going through great lengths to demonstrate the value they place on American identity, by going through legal channels to reside in the United

States.1

I test my argument using an existing national survey, as well as two original national surveys. I find that attachment to American identity and perceptions of immigrant (non)attachment to national identity impacts hostile policy attitudes. I further

1 For example, responding to policies that implicate naturalized citizens should make resultant hostile immigration attitudes unlikely, since naturalization is seen as the ultimate demonstration of commitment to American identity on the part of an immigrant (i.e., naturalization is sufficient proof of attachment and loyalty to America). It is also possible that illegal immigrants are deeply embedded in the minds of American, while legal immigrants are not. Therefore, when asked to offer attitudes about legal immigrants, individuals simply offer the opposite stances they would normally offer about the more relevant group of immigrants in the policy discourse (e.g., illegal immigrants). 3 find strong support for the expectation that the interaction of national identity-based attachments (e.g., personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment) drive especially negative reactions to policies that implicate illegal immigrants. In doing so, I contribute to the emerging scholarship on social identity and immigration opinion within political science. I further expand upon current immigration opinion frameworks by accounting for these disproportionately hostile reactions to illegal immigrants, while putting an emphasis back upon American identity as a salient social identity in the policy discussion about illegal immigration.

The Argument in Brief

This dissertation argues that the visceral reactions in immigration policy attitudes are caused primarily by threats to American identity. Individuals feel that immigrants devalue American identity when immigrants receive favorable treatment without demonstrating that they place positive value on American identity (e.g., are attached to the nation). Thus, threats to American identity are often provoked by perceptions of immigrants not being attached or committed to American identity. The disproportionate amount of hostility toward illegal immigrants is explained by the fact that most hostile policy attitudes are typically expressed when policies involve immigrants that do not demonstrate attachment, by residing in the country illegally.

My theory advances our understanding of immigration policy attitudes by specifying a mechanism of threat by which hostile reactions to illegal immigrants are formed in the United States. Two primary explanations offer important insights regarding immigration opinion and opposition in the U.S., however they cannot account for the

4 puzzle of extreme hostility towards illegal immigrants that shapes the true nature of hostile immigration attitudes in the U.S. First, economic models have been examined and have demonstrated an impact both independently and in concert with other factors driving opposition to immigration in America. Second, racial explanations continue to play a predominant role in immigration policy attitudes, as Hispanic prejudice and generalized prejudice embodied within the concept of ethnocentrism have been discussed as key elements to understanding large-scale opposition to immigration in the United States.

These arguments, while useful, are limited because of their lack of specification for hostility when illegal immigrants are involved. While some arguments are unable to explain the hostile reactions to illegal immigrants because their theoretical frameworks would predict equal hostility for all outsiders (i.e., cultural factors, racism, and/or ethnocentrism), other theoretical frameworks are unequipped to do so because they specify mechanisms that are often shown to be inconsistent with outcomes of hostility that vary by immigrant legal status (i.e., material factors and economic models).

5 a) Anti-Legal Pro-Legal Total Anti-illegal 154 910 1064 Pro-illegal 1 156 157 Total 156 1066 b) Anti-Legal Pro-Legal Total Anti-illegal 166 818 984 Pro-illegal 0 44 44 Total 166 862 a) Source: 21st Century Americanism Survey (P.O.Deborah Schildkraut). b) Source: Original Knowledge Networks Survey. Note: Both samples restricted to non-Hispanic U.S. citizens.

Note: Comparisons are based on preferences for anti and pro restrictive policies for illegal immigrants and legal immigrants.

TABLE 1.1.: POLICY ATTITUDES, BY LEGAL STATUS

Source: Original Knowledge Networks Survey (2010). Sample restricted to non- Hispanic U.S. citizens. Non-responses are omitted from the graphs.

FIGURE 1.1: SUPPORT FOR DECREASING IMMIGRATION, BY IMMIGRANT LEGAL STATUS

6 The existing explanations are limited. Illegal immigrant status is a substantial concern cited by American citizens, with almost all citizens identified as ‘anti-illegal immigrant’ in their policy beliefs (See Table 1.1). Furthermore, Americans’ anti-illegal sentiments overlap heavily with hostile policy preferences about general immigration in a way that feelings about legal immigrants simply do not. In Figure 1.1, there is almost a one-to-one ratio of anti-illegal sentiment with hostile preferences for decreasing overall immigration levels into the United States, while there is not a close relationship with feelings about legal immigrants. These relationships suggest that the perceived beneficiaries- or more realistically, group to be punished- imagined by individuals when forming attitudes, might tell us a lot about what makes individuals willing to voice hostile policy preferences. In specifying an original theory of Threatened American Identity

(TAI) to explain the hostile policy attitudes, I am able to focus on the hostility the public harbors for illegal immigrants, and provide a greater understanding of the emerging trend of immigration policy attitudes in America.

Chapter 2 of this dissertation will discuss exactly how this study advances immigration opinion research by specifying how threats to American identity can explain hostile policy attitudes, particularly those that implicate illegal immigrants. I provide an enhanced theoretical argument to solve the puzzle of hostility in policy attitudes.

Specifically, my theory recognizes that American identity is a salient identity in the immigration policy debate, and explains why illegal immigrants threaten this identity.

Such an explanation can offer a better understanding of the virulent hostility to illegal immigrants that shapes immigration opinion in the United States. An outline of the

7 chapters to follow illustrates how this dissertation’s empirical analyses are then able to test the theoretical expectations of TAI.

Chapter Outline

American identity threat is provoked by perceptions that immigrants do not value

American identity. The empirical analysis begins with a discussion of the two primary measures of American identity threat. One is personal attachment to national identity, while the second measurement is of individual perceptions of the lack of attachment immigrants have to America. For the personal attachment portion of American identity threat, I model hostility in preferences for a Medicaid & Food stamp policy that would benefit immigrants, utilizing ordered probit analyses. This analysis draws on the 21st

Century Americanism Survey (P.I. Deborah Schildkraut, Tufts Univeristy) to test expectations involving American identity threat. I find strong statistical support for my core hypothesis that factors of threat drive visceral reactions to illegal immigrants.

Specifically, I find that adherence to national identity norms and self-identified levels of

American pride are significantly and positively related to hostility toward illegal immigrants benefitting from governmental assistance program policies, ceteris paribus.

At the same time, I show that attitudes toward legal immigrants are weakly held together, with empirical results indicating individuals to be drawing on images of illegal immigrants even when they voice sentiments about legal immigrants.

Drawing on the first of two original surveys, Chapter Four provides a test of attitudes toward a restrictive Arizona law, focusing on the factor of immigrant

(non)attachment. I utilize survey analyses of a sample provided through the Internet

8 polling firm YouGovPolimetrix to test hypotheses regarding the impact of perceptions of immigrants’ attachment to the nation on visceral reactions toward a state law meant to curb illegal immigration. I find strong statistical support for expectations regarding the impact of threatened American identity on hostile policy attitudes toward the Arizona legislation targeting illegal immigration, ceteris paribus.

Chapter Five provides the final examination, which is of the combined effect of the two components of American identity threat. This chapter draws on an original, nationally representative survey conducted by Knowledge Networks (N=1273) to test the interactive impact that threatened American identity factors have upon a hostile federal policy attitude of deportation. The main portion of the analysis includes an estimation of interactive regression models, complemented by graphical analyses of the substantive and statistical significance of the interaction’s effect across the full range of data derived from the OLS model estimation. From this comprehensive examination, I find strong statistical support for the final expectation regarding the positive relationship of the combined influence of TAI factors with support for a hostile federal policy of deportation, ceteris paribus. I further find that this effect exists independently from racial and economic factors, in addition to outperforming these alternative explanations across all tests of their impact upon preferences for a policy of uniform deportation.

Chapter Six concludes this dissertation by offering the main contributions made by this dissertation. I further propose future avenues of research that should be conducted in the realm of immigration attitudes and social identity in order to understand how the various factors of attitude formation relate to one another to provoke hostility toward illegal immigrants. Finally, I pose the question of what are the implications of this

9 research for current policy’s hostile treatment of foreign nationals and naturalized citizens. While hostile policies that target undocumented immigrants have been widely supported by the public, the general lack of awareness about the public’s expressed support for lenient policies for legal immigrants has spurred a concurrent growth of restrictive policies that also affect legal immigrants. My research therefore ultimately sheds light on the factors that provoke hostility toward illegal immigration which colors immigration attitudes overall, while additionally demonstrating the implications that have led to failure to achieve large- scale immigration reform in America.

10

Chapter 2: Threatened American Identity & Hostile Immigration Attitudes

Introduction

The fundamental ingredient defining American culture has often been argued to be a shared sense of history (Miller 2000; Smith 1988). American culture has in turn been attributed largely to a conglomeration of multiple immigrant cultures, with the United

States representing the prime example of a ‘nation of immigrants’ globally. For the most part, Americans continue to take great pride in their nation’s history of immigration.

However, as immigration has changed throughout the years to include increasingly diverse groups of immigrants in terms of racial, economic, and legal statuses, so have opinions regarding how open the U.S. should remain toward newcomers and the policies that accommodate migration into America. This transformation in how the public views immigration has resulted in the current political landscape being inundated by fierce anti- illegal immigrant rhetoric, in addition to outpourings of support for drastic policy prescriptions to address the nation’s illegal immigration concerns, with little mention of policies that deal with legal immigration. As opposed to the tendency of earlier decades, where the policy discussion surrounded questions about restrictive measures that would affect legal immigrants, however, today’s policies reflect the public’s mounting hostilities toward illegal immigrants specifically. This backlash against illegal immigrants that

11 coincides with apparently warmer feelings toward legal immigrants poses an interesting puzzle, since past scholarship has demonstrated hostile reactions to policies where legal immigrants were implicated (See Citrin et al. 1997; Espenshade et al. 1996-1997). With current examinations having not yet distinguished what causes the expression of hostility for illegal immigrants, it is therefore difficult to explain what accounts for public opinion on immigration in America.

This dissertation maintains that a full explanation of hostile immigration attitudes can no longer be achieved by examining the public’s attitudes toward policies that implicate legal immigrants. Conversely, I argue that we can explain the most variation in hostile attitudes when we narrow in on hostility expressed about illegal immigrants. I place threatened American identity at the center of explaining this hostility. The public’s hostile immigration attitudes are driven by a longstanding expectation that immigrants demonstrate their attachment to the nation. I characterize illegal immigrants as the obvious targets of criticisms due to their failure to prove attachment through legal residence. These expectations for immigrants to prove their love for America are rooted in a sense of ownership over American identity on the part of highly attached native-born

Americans (e.g., citizens born in the U.S.) (Sidanious & Pratto 1997). Following this reasoning, my dissertation will ultimately focus on variables that meter perceptions of immigrants when expectations of commitment to the nation are seen as not being fulfilled. While this is at the heart of what I claim drives hostile immigration attitudes, I also meter the important precursor, which is perceived ownership over American identity.

The second variable therefore concerns individual attachment to the nation. I will argue that these two factors account for an increased likelihood of threat to American identity

12 occur, which can explain hostile immigration attitudes, as well as the targeted hostility that exists toward illegal immigrants.

The Rule of Law Questioned

Currently there is a predominance of anti-immigrant sentiment that is accompanied by statements of concern about the rule of law not being adhered to (by illegal immigrants). While the scholarship has been limited in examining these opinions, most scholars who have explored the concept of illegality are wary to accept these justifications for opposition at face value (Ramakrishnan, Neblo, & Esterling 2010). The implication is that citizens do not truly care about illegality, but rather they are using the rule of law publicly to conceal their true motivations for voicing discontent about immigrants. Under this characterization, the rule of law is one of the many postures for anti-immigrant views, but is not the core driver of anti-immigrant attitudes. There is another reason for being skeptical about claims of the rule of law, which is that hostile immigration attitudes have always existed in the U.S., while the illegal status of immigrants is a relatively new concept (See USCIS 1995). If the rule of law were a predominant driver of hostile immigration attitudes, it would represent a vast change in the way Americans have formed their hostile immigration attitudes even over the past decade. This seems highly unlikely given the slow pace of change in public attitudes that have been shown to occur in response to nearly all political issues (Page & Shapiro

1992).

Although we have many reasons to suspect that the rule of law could be a proxy for a more important factor driving hostile immigration attitudes in America, it is

13 undeniable that illegal immigration is what dominates the discussion of immigration.

What explains this hostility towards illegal immigration? It is my argument that hostility that is geared toward illegal immigrants can be explained through symbolic concerns about national identity.2 This is because of the way in which Americans bemoan the lack of adherence by illegal immigrants, which does not imply a general distaste for just any lawbreaking. The objections of those citing the rule of law connote a specific set of citizenship laws that have been broken. These are laws that many citizens see as defining who Americans are as a people (e.g., ‘who counts’), representing for many citizens the factors that unite them with their fellow Americans (e.g., laws incorporate notions of

Americans’ shared history, values, etc.). I argue that outrage about illegal immigrants therefore is indicative of a widespread belief about immigrants being uncommitted to

America, which further serves as evidence that Americans draw from their national identity attachments to inform their hostile responses. As part of this belief, the sidestepping of legal pathways is viewed as the clearest indication of immigrant

(non)attachment. Meanwhile, (non)attachment on the part of legal immigrants is less obvious, which makes individuals simultaneously less willing to espouse hostile attitudes about legal immigrants. 3 Direct parallels of this kind, between explanatory factor and

2 I specify a theory that can explain measurable expressions of hostility. The focus of my research is on the hostile immigration attitudes Americans are willing to voice, since these are citizen interests I argue officials could believe to be held accountable for representing. Expressed opinions should influence policy to a greater degree than those opinions that are kept silent (i.e., attitudes citizens feel are inappropriate to voice). For instance, if the public does not voice disfavor for legal immigrants, even if the public views legal immigrants as disagreeable, politicians are not likely to craft or support anti-legal immigrant policies. However, if the public voices anti-illegal immigrant attitudes, officials are likely to support policies that restrict illegal immigrants’ rights. 3 Therefore, while I offer a national identity based argument for why there is a hostility disparity, I do not discount the possibility that anti-legal attitudes are not present in the latent sense. However, if I was able to measure these latent attitudes, I argue that a threatened American identity framework could explain them as well. 14 immigrant legal status, cannot be offered by racial or economic explanations. There is evidence from past scholarship that racial and economic models would predict equal hostility toward illegal and legal immigrants, for instance. And, there is less of a clear public discourse concerning racial and economic categories being assigned to legal categories of immigrants. I therefore suggest that national identity based models are the correct ones to specify in order to explain citizens’ measurable anti-immigrant sentiment.

Disclaimer about Expressed & Latent Hostilities

In offering my argument, it is not my contention that the public harbors little resentment or hostility toward legal immigrants. If anything, my framework makes an implicit assumption that legal immigrants are also targets of hostility. However, this hostility toward legal immigrants is currently embedded within the more appropriate public expressions of hostilities toward illegal immigrants. There exist centuries of hostility toward immigrants that went through the proper legal channels to gain residence in the United States (i.e., legal immigrants). I therefore do not contend that this hostility has somehow disappeared with rising levels of hostility now expressed toward illegal immigrants. Rather, my argument posits that the way in which the public talks about immigration is no longer appropriately captured and explained through discussions of legal immigrants, and in fact is most appropriately determined by direct measurements of public opinion toward illegal immigrants.4 Immigration is a complex and emerging issue.

4 It is commonplace to hear expressions of resentment and hostility toward illegal immigrants, and it is perfectly acceptable to do so in public. Illegal immigrants are viewed as lawbreakers, and therefore merit punitive measures. However, these types of arguments against illegal immigrants have birthed a logical fallacy if individuals citing this rule of law reasoning then favor punishing legal immigrants. Specifically, the corollary to the ‘rule of law’ that claims that illegal migration merits punishment is that legal 15 Therefore, distinguishing opinions toward the evolving salient immigrant reference groups that shape the discussion is important, especially as citizens change their perceptions about which hostilities are more or less appropriate to express.

Importance

While there are several contributions that will be made by this dissertation, the importance of this examination of threatened American identity comes from three predominant factors. First, my theoretical framework is able to offer a crucial specification that has yet to have occurred in the current scholarship on immigration opinion. Second, my dissertation has important implications for policymaking and the potential for elite manipulation of the masses. Finally, the original data from which I draw allows for the most current understanding of the shape of immigration attitudes in the United States that is possible, by utilizing two original surveys that tap attitudes about the most pressing immigration concerns of the 2010s.

My dissertation contributes to the scholarship on immigration opinion by offering a more realistic portrayal of hostility toward immigration in America, since it focuses on explaining hostilities that are expressed toward illegal immigrants. While I do not rule out the possibility that hostilities toward legal immigrants most likely do affect hostilities toward immigration overall, I claim that illegal immigrants are the appropriate reference

immigrants, by going through proper legal channels to obtain legal residence, therefore merit favorable treatment. And, as it turns out, most citizens currently hold both anti-illegal immigrant and pro-legal immigrant sentiments jointly. The rule of law has become such a large part of the way Americans talk about immigration, that to express hostility toward legal immigrants has been widely discredited, or at a more basic level it is seen as an unreasonable or weak justification for opposing immigration more generally.

16 group to gauge these more general expressions of hostility. This is an important distinction that has gotten little attention throughout political science scholarship, but which this dissertation takes up as a major cause of the partial explanations of immigration attitudes that currently exist. In explaining disparate attitudes, in addition to attitudes toward illegal immigrants, I am therefore able to more fully explain hostile immigration attitudes in America.

In more practical terms, examining the impact of threatened American identity upon hostility toward illegal immigrants is also important from a good policy making standpoint, as well as for its implications for democratic representation in America. The argument that American citizens feel illegal immigrants harm the prestige of identifying as an American suggests that there are currently immigrants that concurrently do not threaten Americans’ national identities. However, absent analyses of these divergent preferences, opposition to immigration overall – rooted in hostility to illegal immigrants specifically – could lead to policies that are restrictive toward even those immigrants

Americans claim to view favorably. The adoption of restrictive immigration policies is problematic if the policies are being crafted to be stern toward illegal immigrants, but then also affect a larger population of legal immigrants that the public claims to look upon favorably. Absent examination of what is impacting the visceral reactions to illegal immigrants in citizens’ policy attitudes, we therefore risk ill-informed policy prescriptions and ultimate adoptions.

From a democratic representation standpoint, examining the hostility toward illegal immigrants in policy viewpoints is essential if we are to understand for which policies the masses are most vulnerable to elite manipulation and potential misinformation. Often

17 times, illegal immigrants are blamed as scapegoats to rouse opposition to lenient immigration policies. If this is the case, then understanding the subtle mechanisms causing the public to harbor hostility toward illegal immigrants in their policy attitudes is crucial to understanding how to combat attempts at manipulation by politicians and other political elites.

Organization

In the next section, I offer a brief synopsis of the historical origins of ‘illegal’ and

‘legal’ labels in America. I use this discussion as a launching point to then describe the puzzle of the hostility disparity, followed by my original theoretical framework of threatened American identity to explain why this hostility disparity exists in response to immigrant groups that were once often (until very recently) perceived as coterminous by

Americans. In brief, the argument of threatened American identity is that hostilities are driven by perceived threats to national identity, with the increasing likelihood that threats to national distinctiveness will be perceived in response to groups that are discussed as

‘not wanting to be American’. Previous decades most likely characterized all immigrants in this way, especially since the public discourse of the day referenced general immigrants as the outsiders in the immigration debate. However, specific labels of immigrant illegal/legal status have been unearthed and emphasized within the current political dialogue. The result has been the development of a perception of illegal immigrants as an obviously uncommitted group, which in turn has merited them more unfavorable treatment. In offering a theory of threatened identity to explain virulent hostility toward illegal immigrants in American, this chapter will present a framework

18 through which we can begin to understand the disproportionate hostility toward illegal immigrants, which exists alongside expressed levels of support for treating legal immigrants favorably.

Historical Context of Immigrant Labels

The American public has traditionally expressed hostility toward immigrant newcomers, however the focus on illegal immigrants is unique to modern times. Illegal immigration was irrelevant in previous decades, primarily for two reasons. First, in the pre-liberalization era (e.g., pre 1965 Immigration Act) there were labor shortages during two world wars that required recruitment by the federal government of foreign labor.

The United States essentially eased Mexican border control efforts from the early 1910s until the mid 1950s to meet their growing wartime labor needs. Illegal immigration was not discussed as a problem during these earlier decades of federal regulation, since efforts were aimed at encouraging potential (cheap) laborers to migrate from Mexico (WGBH

Educational Foundation, 2002-2011).5 Second, illegal immigration failed to gain relevance initially in the post-liberalization decades (e.g., post 1965 Immigration Act), because amnesties granting legal status to immigrants essentially erased all illegal immigration in the United States. The nation’s illegal immigrants were granted legal status first in 1986, and then six more times in the 1990s, which parlayed the discussion of illegal immigration levels as a pressing political problem (WGBH Educational

Foundation 2002-2011, NumbersUSA 2012). Considered together, despite the growing

5 Preventing post-war labor market competition with foreign workers, intermittent deportation efforts were put into place whenever wartime labor shortages slowed. This further stemmed illegal immigration from gaining relevance in the political discourse on immigration reform (WGBH Educational Foundation 2002- 2011). 19 numbers of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. from the 1920s until the 1990s, wartime labor shortages (accompanied by subsequent deportation efforts: See Footnote 5) and blanket amnesties contributed to a previous political discourse that avoided the issue of illegal immigration altogether. However, America is no longer faced with wartime labor shortages. Additionally, amnesty is no longer considered a viable policy option to decrease illegal immigration. Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform & Control Act, which granted roughly three million immigrants amnesty, was met with support from the

American public. Due to the failure of the 1986 IRCA, in addition to other amnesties, to stem the tide of illegal immigration, mentioning amnesty in the discourse tends to instigate widespread opposition on the part of elites and the public (Thrasher 2007). As a result of the economic needs of the nation being less dependent on foreign labor (due to lack of wartime shortages), in addition to several failed attempts of past policies to provide short-term solutions to illegal immigration, the discourse is now focused almost entirely on this previously avoided topic. And, the political discourse surrounding illegal immigration has been in a decidedly hostile direction. What caused the political landscape to foster such hostility?

The vast hostility that Americans hold for illegal immigrants has its roots in the advancement of immigration policy of the sixties, which has been commonly referred to as the ‘era of liberalization’. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 had the unintended consequence of increasing those labeled as “illegal” immigrants, by placing the first quotas on the number of immigrants arriving from the Western Hemisphere (USCIS

20 1995). 6 In addition to this new limitation on Latin American migration, the policy emphasized family reunification as a basis for obtaining a visa, which subsequently meant that large numbers of Mexicans continued to receive visas, based on their status as family members of U.S. citizens and legal residents. Overall, then, Mexican immigration was increasing noticeably, both in terms of legal, and the newly minted illegal immigrants that were arriving to America. However, officials did not foresee the expansion of Latin American migration that came with this policy change, as well as the swelling of the new illegal immigration before its relative explosion in the 1980s.7

President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed while signing the bill into law, “This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives” (Center for Immigration Studies 1995). As we now know, his understanding of the importance of the immigration policy could not have been further from the truth.8

6 While undocumented workers existed since before the passage of the 1965 Act, it wasn’t until the Hart- Cellar Act of 1965 was passed into law that immigrants were required to face legal recourse if their residence in the U.S. was undocumented, sometimes meaning that they would be detained and deported. The 1954 “Operation Wetback”, which was ordered by President Eisenhower, demonstrates an exception to the predominant laissez faire attitude the U.S. had towards Mexican immigration before the 1965 policy change. The operation consisted of a massive deportation effort, in which hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers were deported based on an executive order to rid the U.S. of Mexican migrant workers from a guest worker program (Bracero Program). This occurred as the result of economic relations between Mexico and the U.S. having soured as a result of the policy having been poorly received by Mexican officials and U.S. business owners. 7 The rise in Mexican migration coincided with one of the largest increases in public opposition to general levels of immigration into America. Espenshade (1996-97) notes that preference for decreasing immigration doubled from 1965 to 1981 (from one-third to two-thirds of the public favoring less immigration). 8 However, the statement by President Johnson actually offers a reasonable explanation for why the grave impact of the 1965 immigration policy was unforeseen by political officials at the time. First, Johnson, like many other officials, felt that the new law was an extension of the sixties’ Civil Rights agenda, and the abolishment of Eastern Hemispheric national origin quotas was merely a symbolic injection of the movement’s positive values of freedom and liberty into the nation’s immigration policy. Second, politicians that were occupied with concerns over foreign policy saw the repeal of national origin quotas as a necessary symbolic act in order for the U.S. to garner support from developing countries during the Cold War (who politicians largely believed would not seek asylum into the U.S. despite the offer being 21 It is now clear that the Hart-Cellar Act greatly limited Mexicans’ ability to migrate legally, as it established the nation’s first quota on Mexican migration. The vast majority of Mexican migrants who previously entered the country freely suddenly had to decide whether to stay in Mexico during harsh economic times, or risk migrating illegally. It is also responsible for the increasing use of the currently widespread terminology of ‘illegal’ immigrants. This label would mean very little if it did not elicit a hostile response on the part of the public. However, the public expresses almost uniformly hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants, while simultaneously offering favorable expressions of support for legal immigrants. This dissertation seeks to answer, why these relatively new labels for immigrants now translate into disparate levels of expressed public hostility toward immigration policies of illegal versus legal immigrants.

As Truman noted, hostility and cruelty have always been present in the public attitudes about immigration, so what explains the continuing trend that is now directed at illegal immigrants? Answering the puzzle of hostile policy attitudes, and of illegal immigrant hostility more generally, ultimately can be accomplished using a threatened American identity explanation.

The Puzzle of the Hostility Disparity & the Anti-Illegal Fixation

More than a half-century after the development of legal statuses began to paint the landscape of immigration in America, high-profile incidents have begun to shed light on the extreme levels of hostility that the public is willing to express toward illegal increasingly available to them). In sum, the domestic and foreign concerns of the day necessarily drew the public’s focus away from the Western Hemisphere, and in particular, away from the steadily increasing migratory behavior of neighboring Mexico.

22 immigrants. Perhaps most blatant two years ago was a list of suspected undocumented immigrants that was circulated by a group in Utah calling itself “Concerned Citizens of the United States”, which highlighted women who were pregnant alongside their due dates; as the group was calling for immediate deportation of illegal immigrants, their inclusion of due dates was an added attempt to block newborn children of immigrants in the U.S. from gaining birthright citizenship (Johnson New York Times, July 2010).

Likewise, U.S. politicians during the midterm election season of 2010 took up the issue of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment to try to garner public support by highlighting their opposition to the constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) sentiment was indicative of the hostility that exists towards illegal immigrants in the debate surrounding the Fourteenth

Amendment, in his statement, “they come here to drop a baby” (Kahn NPR, August

2010).

Hostility toward illegal immigrants continues to surround the discussion of immigration in the 2012 presidential election. Republican candidate Mitt Romney has taken advantage of hard-line rhetoric targeting unauthorized immigrants to court

Republican primary voters. While initially attacking Texas Governor Rick Perry for signing a law that would provide the children of illegal immigrants with in-state tuition to attend public university, Romney consistently opposed any candidate stances that would make services available to illegal immigrants (Navarett CNN, January 2012). Romney has labeled his own stance on immigration one that encourages “self deportation”, which means restricting illegal immigrants so that they cannot live comfortably in the United

States, and choose to return to their home countries (Washington Post, January 2012). His

23 approach does not diverge greatly from the restrictive tone set by Democrats, however.

Indeed, Republicans are not alone in trying to garner support from the “anti-illegal” crowd. During his first term as president, Barack Obama set a record for deporting unauthorized immigrants, having outpaced the rate of deportations by the previous Bush administration every year since taking office (Bennett LA Times, October 2011,

Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse- Syracuse University, 2011). President

Obama continues to support this deportation strategy, while claiming to focus deportations primarily on those who have committed crimes (New York Times 2011,

Chicago Sun Times, November 2011). It is clear that regardless of their partisan attachments, candidates to public office are aware of the majority of anti-illegal citizens in the nation, and will continue to be responsive to this large bloc of voters.

The Past: Legal Immigration

In contrast to the vast amount of hostile discussion about illegal immigrants in the

U.S., there has been relatively little expression of coinciding public hostility toward legal immigrants or the policies that affect them. Obama is now attempting to shorten the amount of time family members of immigrants in the United States have to wait to receive visas, which could be interpreted as positively affecting legal immigrants. Not surprisingly however, policies affecting legal immigrants inevitably get switched to a discussion of how they might be connected to the issue of illegal immigration. Most of

Obama’s attempts to focus on visa waiting periods have been discussed in terms of how they will affect illegal immigrants’ ability to achieve citizenship (See ABC News,

February 2012, New York Times 2012). While policies affecting legal immigrants might

24 seem irrelevant to most Americans today, the current lack of emphasis on legal immigrants should seem puzzling to scholars. Legal immigrants were the focus of a political agenda of immigration reform in the nineties, where they were seen as the main beneficiaries of welfare programs. The prevailing scholarship likewise only previously mentioned illegal immigration when it applied to explaining the primary concern about the vast restrictions the government was attempting to place upon legal immigrants.

“Together, nativism and fiscal conservatism have brought about

legislation that seeks to reduce the public costs of immigration by

extending to legal immigrants the restrictions on the receipt of social

services that have customarily applied only to illegal immigrants. Within

this new fiscal politics of immigration, legal aliens came to be viewed as

part of the reason for the high cost of social services. Having little or no

voice in the electorate, they became an attractive and vulnerable target”

(Espenshade 1996-1997).

Espenshade’s portrait of legal immigrants as vulnerable targets and illegal immigrants as less obviously problematic to the nation differs dramatically from today’s discussion about immigration, which is wholly concerned with illegal immigrants.

Espenshade’s work did not stand alone in its focus on legal immigration during the

1990s, either. Citrin’s 1997 study of public opposition to immigration took the concerns with legal immigrants in the public discourse, and made them the focus of an analysis of the economic motivations behind national immigration opinion (Citrin, Muste, & Wong

1997). His analysis remains a widely cited work that has influenced the field’s understanding about national economic concerns prevailing over personal financial

25 hardship to drive hostile immigration attitudes. However, today, most would be puzzled over using a question about legal immigrants to explain the formation of immigration attitudes. The focus in the scholarship on legal immigrants followed a national trend of public opinion polling which sought to understand immigration policy attitudes affecting relevant groups of immigrants in America (i.e., as opposed to more traditional questions about preferences for whether to increase or decrease immigration into America).

National opinion polls that questioned Americans about their immigration related beliefs during the 1990s asked minimal questions about policy attitudes affecting immigrants.

However, the one that was collected (on the 1992 ANES) was used for its question about legal immigrants, with no major analyses of corresponding national attitudes about illegal immigrants. Overall, with the exception of a focus on regional concerns (e.g., studies specifically about California), illegal immigration was not seen as a pressing national issue that merited a spot in the policy discussion (See Schildkraut 2012 for historical limitations of immigration questionnaire items).

The Present: Illegal Immigration

This could not be further from the policy discussion today, of course. In a dramatic shift away from this portrayal of the previous support for restricting legal immigrants, a majority of the public currently supports those policies where legal immigrants benefit. And, this is not an effect based on a population of people who are generally pro-immigrant versus others who are generally anti-immigrant. Table 2.1 presents the breakdown of individuals who are jointly ‘anti-illegal’ immigrant and ‘pro- legal’ immigrant in their policy attitudes. Across two surveys conducted in 2004 and

26 2010, over seventy percent of each sample was anti-illegal and pro-legal. Small minorities of the respondents in both surveys were uniformly anti-immigrant or pro- immigrant in their policy attitudes. Not surprisingly, across both surveys, zero percent of respondent held the joint beliefs of anti-legal policy attitudes alongside pro attitudes.

These surveys demonstrate that most Americans are willing to voice anti-illegal policy attitudes. At the same time, they are unwilling to voice antagonism toward legal immigrants.

Given the vast amount of hostility that has been expressed for illegal immigrants, and the disparate levels expressed for legal immigrants, the question I pose is why is the public so frequently hostile toward policies affecting illegal immigrants, while simultaneously appearing accommodating and even sympathetic on policies of legal immigration? What explains the gulf in hostile policy attitudes that exist for illegal versus legal immigrants? This question further begs the question of whether the hostility of the past has now shifted to a socially appropriate form of hostility, which targets illegal immigrants.

27

a)

Anti-Legal Pro-Legal Total (13%) (87%) Anti-illegal (87%) 13% 74% 154 910 1064 Pro-illegal (13%) 0% 13% 1 156 157 Total 156 1066

b) Anti-Legal Pro-Legal Total (18%) (82%) Anti-illegal (96%) 18% 72% 884 166 818 Pro-illegal (4%) 0% 4% 44 0 44 Total 166 862 A)Source: 21st Century Americanism Survey (P.I. Deborah Schildkraut). Sample restricted to Non-Hispanic U.S. citizens. African Americans omitted. B)Source: Original Knowledge Networks Survey (P.I. Irfan Nooruddin). Sample restricted to non-Hispanic U.S. citizens.

Note: Tables a) and b) present the percentages of individuals who are jointly ‘anti-illegal’ immigrant and ‘pro-legal’ immigrant in their policy attitudes. ‘Anti’ connoted restrictive policy preferences, whereas ‘pro- connoted lenient policy preferences. These included preferences for providing immigrants with Medicaid & food stamp, workman’s compensation, and deportation policy preferences.

TABLE 2.1 INDIVIDUALS HOLDING JOINT ‘ANTI-ILLEGAL’ AND ‘PRO-LEGAL’ SENTIMENTS

An adequate theory of immigration opinion in the United States needs to account for the consistent levels of hostility towards illegal immigrants embedded within citizen policy attitudes. General disregard for lawbreakers, or adherence to the ‘rule of law’, is something most individuals routinely value in the abstract, and some scholars have started to explore this new explanation for the emergent narrowing of hostilities toward 28 illegal immigrants. However, the theoretical explanation for how legal adherence relates to issues of citizenship and immigration remains underdeveloped and untested. I argue that existing theories of symbolic/racial and economic factors are insufficient to explain the current emphasis of immigration opinion in America (e.g., illegal immigration). In particular, what is needed is a theory that speaks to the way Americans are willing to express their hostile attitudes, which I argue is through their concerns about citizenship and American identity. For this reason, I argue that an original theory of Threatened

American Identity offers an improvement over past theories to explain hostile policy attitudes, which implicate illegal immigrants.

Existing Explanations

Current explanations of hostile immigration attitudes employ two dominant models, which provide material and symbolic frameworks for understanding hostility.

Material explanations view the key mechanism of anti-immigrant sentiments to be economic competition, which are caused by the desire to be better off personally and collectively as a national group (Hardin 1995). Conversely, symbolic explanations view the mechanism to be self-categorization into groups, which is caused by a desire to maintain positive differentiation between one’s group and any given outgroup (Brown

1995; Tajfel 1981). Any group-based and/or psychological theory falls under the category of a symbolic model, due to the fact that they do not explain realistic or monetary causes of hostility. Symbolic models focus on personal or emotional causes of attitude formation and expression. The most popular symbolic models that I will mention throughout this dissertation are racial prejudice explanations and national identity explanations; I will

29 confront these alternative symbolic models in order to provide a direct test to my own theory of Threatened American Identity, which also falls under this important category of symbolic explanations of hostility. Throughout the remaining chapters, I will consider competing racial and national identity models as falling under this category of “other symbolic explanations” of hostile immigration attitudes, and in particular use the terms

‘racial’, ‘racial prejudice’, and ‘symbolic’ interchangeably. A wide-ranging scholarship on the economic ramifications of immigration initially caused scholars to theorize a large role of economic forces behind hostile immigration attitudes (Borjas 1990; 1999;

Camarota 1997; Frey 1995; Huber & Espenshade 1997; Topel 1994). The result was that economic or material factors were thought to be major forces in determining hostile immigration attitudes (Espenshade 1996; Olzak 1992). However, a few key studies testing the competing models’ claims have resulted in a scholarly consensus that favors the symbolic explanation, and more specifically a national identity explanation (Citrin,

Greene, Muste, & Wong 1996; Citrin, Reingold, Walker, & Green 1990; Sniderman,

Hangerdoon, & Prior 2004).9 Despite the disproportionate support for symbolic explanations, it is still appropriate to test material claims due to the variable nature of economic forces within and between nations, however. I therefore test my theory against the two traditional competing models to examine how they operate in the specific case of

American public opinion.

9 In particular, a study by Sniderman and colleagues used intricate survey experiments to analyze the effects of collective and individual national identity and economic threats in The Netherlands, and found that national identity was an overall better predictor of attitudes than a variety of economic forces (Sniderman, Hangerdoon, & Prior 2004). Most scholars have interpreted such findings as discrediting the material model. However, this conclusion might be overlooking important stipulations put forth by Sniderman et al.’s study. “First, the bearing of economic concerns on issues of immigrants and immigration is conditional on economic conditions [in the nation]… Second, the impact of concerns about national identity is conditional on the prominence of differences between groups (p. 36).” 30

General limitations

Both models are useful for uncovering the mechanisms at work with certain types of hostile immigration attitudes at one time or another. Yet, unlike my threatened

American identity explanation, the existing models do not offer viable explanations for the deluge of anti-illegal sentiment that the public expresses, and the related conflation of anti-illegal sentiment with more general anti-immigration attitudes that follow. The public tends to conflate ‘immigrants’ with ‘illegal immigrants’ (Ramakrishnan, Neblo, &

Esterling 2010). Since anti-illegal immigrant expressions are perceived as appropriate, the conflation of generalized anti-immigrant with specific anti-illegal rhetoric therefore elevates generalized anti-immigrant expressions to a level of social acceptance. In other words, citizens are not viewed as inappropriate when they voice anti-immigrant sentiments, because the public assumes opposition is the result of antipathy toward lawbreakers. However, the public’s willingness to offer hostile attitudes in a period of time when the topic is being cast in terms of illegal immigration remains an underdeveloped and untested theme of hostile attitude expression. This limitation is highlighted by the existing racial and economic definitions of immigrant reference groups, which frequently fail to incorporate varying legal status into their analyses. If legal status were taken more seriously, it would be clear why national identity concerns have strong predictive power to explain hostile attitudes. It would also become apparent what are the specific roles that economics and racial prejudice played alongside national identity. Legal status necessarily brings to the fore concerns about citizenship and

31 national identity, which is why I place threats to national identity at the center of explaining explicit expressions of hostility.

My study also corrects for a deficiency of past models in their omission of important explanatory variables that should be tested against each other. Very few, if any, of the existing studies incorporate the three most dominant explanatory factors within the same analysis. These factors include key economic variables, in addition to the main symbolic variables of racial prejudice and national identity. Most researchers provide economic variables alongside national identity without including racial prejudice variables (See Sniderman et al. 2004 for an example, and Theiss-Morse 2009’s argument for omitting racial variables alongside measures of American identity), or they examine economic variables alongside racial prejudice variables without national identity variables (See Burns & Gimpel 2000 for an example). Most examinations therefore are limited by not including tests of racial prejudice explanations against national identity.

This would seem to be a most serious limitation in light of the fact that symbolic factors have been shown to be the predominant drivers of hostile immigration attitudes.

Ultimately, we must question whether this superiority is driven by other symbolic variables that are omitted from their analyses.

Finally, my analysis will avoid the tendency of the existing scholarship to make untested claims about the causal pathways between important independent variables. In the examination of hostile immigration attitudes, many scholars have come to the conclusion that racial prejudice might undergird nationalist sentiments, while others have theorized nationalism effects absent direct tests against racial prejudice. However, the proper tests of these claims have not been performed to hypothesize these effects. It

32 seems premature to conclude there to be intervening processes occurring until we uncover whether there are any independent effects from symbolic factors once they are tested against one another (i.e., claiming racial prejudice to drive nationalist effects without first providing tests of their independent effects). If there are smaller effects than expected, then we might infer that further testing of causal pathways and meditational effects is needed. However, there are very few studies that have tested symbolic attachments against each other. Equally worrisome is the fact that these hypothetical propositions about the factors working as proxies for one another does not seem likely from a theoretical perspective. For example, while patriotism might manifest itself by way of racial prejudice to form hostile immigration attitudes, it is reasonable to expect there to be citizens who are patriotic but do not express prejudicial sentiments. It is also probable that citizens who express prejudicial sentiments will not always identify as patriots. Likewise, economic vulnerability might provoke prejudice and immigrant hostility, but there are also likely to be economically vulnerable individuals who expressly reject prejudicial beliefs (Burns & Gimpel 2000). These are probable examples of how individuals express their symbolic and economic concerns, which are independently of one another. I first and foremost seek to test the variables that could result in important independent effects, before assuming any implicit associations or crossover effects between these independently theorized variables. Future research should however consider how these variables might mediate one another in the hostile immigration attitude process.

In the subsequent sections, I will discuss the existing scholarship on hostile immigration attitudes from material and symbolic perspectives. I will also offer an

33 explanation as to why a threatened American identity explanation can offer improvements to the existing material and symbolic models. I will start by discussing the current material models of hostility.

Material

Generally speaking, material models have employed concerns about immigrants as fiscal burdens and displacers of ‘natives’ jobs (e.g., workers born in the U.S.). These models are in keeping with a familiar discussion about sociotropic versus pocketbook concerns shaping public opinion. Within this discussion, more large-scale perceptions of the national economy’s wellbeing represent sociotropic concerns, while financial self- interest and personal economic situation represent pocketbook concerns. The general trend throughout time has been for people’s opinions to be much more likely to be driven by overall perceptions of national economic health as opposed to concerns over their own personal economic situation (Brody and Sniderman 1977; Sears and Funk 1990; Verba and Schlozman 1979). However, as Kinder notes, “Self interest matters, or seems to, when the material benefits or harms of a proposed policy is substantial, imminent, and well-publicized” (Kinder 1998; p. 802). That is to say, while national-level economic effects are more common, personal-level economic effects could occasionally be important drivers of attitudes. Most of the scholarship examining immigration attitudes has therefore tested these traditional economic determinants laid out in the public opinion literature. First, that holding negative views of the national economy would make a citizen more likely to hold hostile attitudes toward immigrants. And second, that personal factors such as unemployment status and being a direct labor market competitor to an

34 immigrant group (e.g., ‘substitute’) would also make an individual more likely to express hostile immigration attitudes (Calavita 1996). Overall, the symbolic explanations have displaced economic ones because of the material model’s limited ability to explain immigration attitudes on its own (Sniderman, Hangerdoon, & Prior 2004). The national economic competition scholarship highlights this fact well.

National Economic Competition

The national economic competition scholarship is characterized by two findings.

One is a consistent tendency of citizens to be hostile toward immigrants during recessions and economic downturns. Second is a consistent overshadowing by alternatively hypothesized symbolic variables. There has been consistent evidence that prejudice towards immigrant populations increases during national economic hard times, especially during recessions (Abowd & Freeman 1991; Borjas & Freeman 1992; Harwood 1983;

Hingham 1988; Epenshade 1993; Olzak 1992). Despite the strong evidence of hostile attitudes occurring during economic downturns however, scholars have offered convincing arguments about the theoretical flaws of these types of economic theories.

Furthermore, most economic variables are consistently outperformed by alternatively hypothesized symbolic variables. Calavita highlights the overall theoretical weakness of even these well-performing economic justifications for oppositional attitudes. Her argument is that economic preferences act as symbolic voicing of grievances whereby immigrants are used as scapegoats for whatever is making the public unhappy at a given point in time (Calavita 1996). Therefore, it is impossible to separate the symbolic displacement of blame away from economic models, which regardless of economic

35 findings, has the overall result of prizing symbolic models as the more appropriate ones to explain immigrant hostilities. In addition to this theoretical weakness, these economic factors are then consistently outperformed by symbolic variables. Sniderman and colleagues (2004) used elaborate survey experiments to demonstrate this tendency.

Specifically, this research tests the effects of a variety of economic variables against symbolic national identity concerns. The economic variables perform poorly compared to national identity factors, which most scholars have used as disconfirmation of the material model’s predictive power (Sniderman, Hangerdoon, & Prior 2004). Considered together, the main limitations of national economic competition explanations fall within its inability to be theoretically teased apart from symbolic explanations, in addition to the symbolic factors consistently outperforming economic ones across virtually all analyses performed. For these reasons, alternative explanations of labor market competition have experienced a revival in the public opinion scholarship on immigration. However, they too suffer from limitations.

Labor Market Competition

The labor market competition research that exists has drawn on a variety of different methods to test the effects of personal economic vulnerability. These studies have largely been limited in their ability to explain attitudes on their own, for the same reasons that national economic competition models are limited (i.e., symbolic factors are more powerful predictors of hostility). However, they are also limited in two more specific ways. First, they have questionable definitions of the targets of hostility. These theories predict hostile attitudes toward ‘low skilled’ versus ‘high skilled’ workers. I

36 argue that when deciding which attitude to express, people are more likely to imagine illegal immigrants, not low skilled workers. Second, material concerns are unable to explain hostilities that specifically are bestowed toward illegal immigrants but not legal immigrants.

Most of the emerging economic scholarship shares similarities with past studies that conceptualize immigrants as varying by worker skill levels (Mayda 2006; O’Rourke

& Sinnott 2006; Scheve & Slaughter 2001). These models of immigration attitudes have theoretical weaknesses that make them unable to explain anti- immigrant views that are specifically anti-illegal immigrant, which are also complemented by empirical inconsistencies. There is most likely some overlap between what the public views as a low skilled worker and an illegal immigrant, however the way the public actually talks about immigrants is specifically in terms of illegal immigrants. Since labor market competition models explain public hostility as a response to low skilled versus high skilled workers, they therefore tend to miss the true variation in expressed hostilities, ultimately leading to inconsistent empirical findings. For example, researchers recently found that economic backgrounds do not significantly inform opposition to immigration, with the public uniformly opposing low-skilled workers more than high-skilled workers regardless of their own economic background (Hainmueller & Hiscox 2010).10 This finding is consistent with the public opinion scholarship regarding the weak effects of individual economic wellbeing on political behavior. The construct of immigrant worker status is also shown to be limited on its own, as the majority of studies ultimately

10 Their work has been offered to counter previous accounts of economic impact arising from vulnerable group status, skilled versus unskilled worker occupational background, and general socioeconomic status effects (Valentino, Brader, Jardina 2010). 37 combine it with country of origin statuses (Barreto 2007; Lee et al. 2001). The combination of skill level and country of origin seems to be an obvious proxy for the more appropriate illegal immigrant label that people actually consider when forming hostile attitudes.

One might reasonably conclude that given these limitations, economic models could simply specify the reference group more precisely as illegal immigrants in order to explain expressed hostilities. Unfortunately, this theoretical improvement could not feasibly increase the power of material models to explain hostile attitudes. Consider the problems that would arise if scholars were to employ economic explanations of hostility toward immigrant groups that people actually talk about when expressing their hostilities

(i.e., illegal immigrants). By all material standards, legal immigrants should merit the most hostility. Legal immigrants pose a greater level of threat as job competitors, and also as fiscal burdens to the system. First, they are typically highly skilled workers, which would make them greater competitors with most ‘native’ born workers. Second, their greater numbers, and increased access to services drive the fiscal burden. Both of these factors should hypothetically make them more threatening from an economic standpoint, and economic factors should predict anti-legal attitudes.11 Certainly, absent a symbolic explanation, there is no economic justification for why unskilled workers should be treated with more hostility. By and large, other than pocketbook explanations’ general inability to explain much above the effects of sociotropic economic factors, these labor market competition and pocketbook models suffer from poor theoretical constructs and

11 While this assessment seems laughably inaccurate given the anti-illegal immigrant climate of the nation, these were the main expectations of economic theories in the not-so-distant past. Scholars in the 1990s utilized this logic about legal immigrant threat to examine economic influences upon anti-immigration attitudes (Citrin et al 1997; Espenshade 1996-97). 38 subsequently inconsistent results. In contrast, I will demonstrate that threatened

American identity draws more realistic theoretical distinctions to be able to model the processes by which citizens form their hostilities toward immigrants in America, which produces consistent results.

Improvement over Material

A threatened American identity explanation offers several improvements from the existing material explanations. Importantly, it offers a symbolic explanation of hostile immigration attitudes. Presenting a symbolic model that posits threats to national identity is consistent with the prevailing wisdom about the predominance of group attachments to explain hostile immigration attitudes, especially in their ability to outperform hypothesized economic forces. There has been no firm evidence to suggest that people take their personal economic situation into consideration when expressing their immigration attitudes. Nor is there strong evidence to suggest national level economic evaluations can reach the explanatory power of any group attachment explanation. In fact, all studies have indicated the opposite, with symbolic explanatory factors outperforming material factors across all analyses (Burns & Gimpel 2000; Citrin;

Sniderman, Hangerdoon, & Prior 2004). My model also offers an improvement over material models in that it does not draw on immigrant reference groups defined by worker skill levels. I argue that these immigrant groups are questionable to theorize as reference groups in the public’s minds, as well as producing inconsistent effects across most analyses utilizing them (Hainmueller & Hiscox 2010). A threatened American identity explanation is able to theorize immigrant groups the way Americans actually talk

39 about them, in legal terms. I contend that illegal status necessarily brings to the fore national identity concerns, as the laws being broken are specifically related to citizenship and concern ‘who counts’ as an American.

Symbolic

As a result of the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the material model, the symbolic model has become the more widely accepted mode for uncovering what causes hostility. Symbolic explanations are unified by the expectation that individuals need to maintain a positive group differentiation. Since individuals naturally self- categorize themselves into groups, they can often choose to express hostile attitudes in order to positively differentiate one’s own social identity from outgroups. One set of explanations posits the salient social group in this scenario to be racial identity based, while another posits it to be national identity based. Racial prejudice models explain hostile immigration attitudes as the result of white hostility toward racial minorities.

Conversely, national identity models explain hostile immigration attitudes as the result of patriots characterizing immigrants as un-American. Overall, these symbolic group-based theories have provided more convincing theoretical accounts of anti-immigrant stances than those derived from material models, and have generated recent evidence to buttress their claims (Brader, Valentino, Jardina 2010; Wright & Citrin 2011). They can explain generalized immigration attitudes well, although they often are unable to confront the question of hostile policy attitudes, particularly those that implicate illegal immigrants.

Furthermore, symbolic models have not typically tested multiple symbolic factors within the same analysis. Overall, omitting important symbolic factors from the analysis limits

40 our ability to understand whether one symbolic factor is driving other symbolic effects.

Since the prevailing wisdom is that the symbolic model is the correct one, this should be considered a pressing question to be answered.

Racial Prejudice

For the most part, political science scholarship has been slow to include racial prejudice variables into its models of hostile immigration attitudes. Much of this has to do with the fact that hostile immigration attitudes are pervasive in the United States, whereas racial prejudice is an attitude that Americans are typically unwilling to express openly. Scholars have therefore been limited in their ability to measure the types of racial prejudice that are involved in the immigration issue.12 Due to the difficulties associated with measurement, researchers have attempted to draw upon a wide range of prejudices to gauge generalized animus (Brader et al 2010; Kinder & Kam 2009; Perez 2008). This research has used prejudice against Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics to explain attitudes.

Scholars have recently noted the theoretical weaknesses of using such a broad-based approach to prejudicial effects, however (Brader et al 2010). Brader and colleagues have switched the focus to direct tests of racial prejudice against Hispanics. The typical image of an immigrant into America is largely a Hispanic one. Therefore, prejudice against

Latinos and Hispanics is theoretically more direct since Latinos are the immigrants many

Americans most likely picture when they form hostile immigration attitudes. There has at least been modest evidence of anti-Mexican and anti-Latino effects exhibited across a

12 In hypothesizing national identity effects, many studies often incorporate a role for racial prejudice (and other factors) within their discussion of the nation (See Schildkraut’s 2006 discussion of ethnocultural Americanism for an example), but largely as a secondary concern. 41 few studies (Alba, Rumbaut, & Marotz 2005; Lee & Ottati 2002; Lee, Ottati, & Hussain

2001). However, even when the prejudice is theorized towards Hispanics, most current public opinion studies that draw on these more targeted measures of prejudice have found that it actually does not explain non-Hispanic attitudes well (Barreto 2007;

McConnaughy et al. 2011). Theoretically, then, our understanding of what role prejudice has to play in the immigration issue is limited. And empirically, the evidence of its effects has been surprisingly minimal.

These general theoretical and empirical limitations are further compounded once we attempt to theorize a role for racial prejudice in driving anti-illegal immigrant attitudes. Under a racial prejudice framework, anti-illegal immigrant attitudes could be explained if people perceived illegal immigrants as racial minorities, while perceiving legal immigrants as not. Is it reasonable to assume that people imagine illegal immigrants as racial minorities while imagining legal immigrants as being white, however? I argue that it is more likely that citizens think of both immigrant groups as racial minorities. In particular, legal and illegal immigrants seem to be predominantly thought of as Latino, and even more specifically as Mexicans (Brader, Valentino, &

Jardina 2010; Perez 2009; Ramakrishnan, Esterling, & Neblo 2010). If past racial prejudice models have assumed that Americans imagine immigrants in such a way, this could explain why they have not sufficiently explained hostilities expressed in the past.

Moreover, it would help us understand why prejudice models cannot explain the current emphasis on anti-illegal immigrant hostilities in America.13 Therefore, while racial

13 The counterargument to this claim is that the hostility disparity could still be explained by racial prejudice if it were working through another important variable, such as economic factors and/or threatened American identity. The reason one might suspect this to happen is that “more respectable restrictionists 42 prejudice factors have been shown to be spotty predictors of generalized hostile immigration attitudes, they also do not yet supply theoretically coherent models of anti- illegal immigrant attitudes.

National Identity

For these reasons, the symbolic national identity-based models provide the most appealing theoretical explanations for why many Americans hold hostile immigration attitudes, and anti-illegal immigrant attitudes. Insofar as they have been able to contribute to our understanding of immigration attitudes, especially through social identity theory applications, they too have limitations. National identity has been broken down into two broad categories of attachments. One involves more positive feelings citizens hold about the national ingroup, patriotism, while the other refers to a more critical view of attachment, which are based upon feelings of superiority over outgroups, nationalism. As a result of these broadly accepted categories, studies have either tested nationalism against patriotism, or incorporated them into broader social theories as separate factors (deFiguerido and Elkins 2003; Theiss-Morse 2009). Others have gone beyond this two-dimensional understanding by demonstrating the multidimensionality of never argue for reducing immigration on blatant racist or nativist grounds” (Burns & Gimpel 2000). Some Americans may feel uncomfortable voicing their racially prejudicial attitudes. If explicit racial prejudice measurements are limited in their ability to gauge racial prejudice against Latinos, then this might seriously hinder the ability to generalize any findings from models employing these measures. However, the fact is that there are still many Americans that freely express explicit racial prejudice. Therefore, while I believe examining how racial prejudice might work through other variables merits further investigation, I maintain that racial prejudice models provide important information about people’s anti-Latino predispositions. Furthermore, I contend that the more pressing limitation of racial prejudice models is a theoretical one of not being able to explain anti-illegal immigrant attitudes and therefore the impetus for generalized anti- immigrant attitudes. As such, I will limit my analyses to determining how the willingness to voice explicit forms of racial prejudice shapes hostile immigration attitudes that are expressed. In doing so, I argue that theories of explicit racial prejudice still provide relevant hypotheses to be tested before more implicit processes are hypothesized.

43 national identity attachment (Huddy and Khatib 2007). Generally, the more negative attachments have been shown to lead individuals to express hostile attitudes, while the positive attachments are perceived to be less likely to lead to hostile attitudes.

Current studies offering national identity explanations have appropriately drawn upon social identity theory to construct their theoretical expectations (deFiguerido &

Elkins 2007; Sniderman, Hangerdoon, & Prior 2004; Schildkraut 2007; Theiss-Morse

2009; Wright & Citrin 2011). However, they are theorized rather loosely, and are not geared to the specific types of identities that each nation represents. I will argue that national identities, just as social identities, vary by status (or perceived status). I further contend that high status national identity affects one’s political behavior. Individuals who form attachments to high versus low status groups form prejudicial attitudes in different ways and to varying degrees. As social identity theorists note, attachment does not automatically provoke prejudicial attitudes, especially in the case of immigration (See deFiguerido & Elkins “Are Patriots Bigots?”). Prejudicial attitudes are likely to be provoked under the circumstance of a high status group attachment. High status, or established, members have been found to feel a sense of ownership over their valuable group identity, which is why threats are readily provoked, regardless of a threat’s credibility (deFiguerido & Elkins 2003; Sidanius & Pratto 1999). Current studies that do not specify the actual process of threat arising due to group status are limited, because they cannot tell us much about the role of perceived threats to American identity.

Additionally, existing explanations do not provide generalizable accounts of across country variations in anti-immigrant attitude processes. It is most likely the case that

44 American identity is unique from a status perspective, differing from the way a Dutch,

Ukranian, Chinese, or any other nation’s patriot forms prejudicial immigration attitudes.

Improvement over Symbolic

A threatened American identity model can therefore improve upon the existing symbolic explanations by drawing on the most consistent symbolic predictor of anti- immigrant attitudes, national identity. American identity explanations have resulted in consistent and statistically strong effects, while lacking many of the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of current racial prejudice models. First, they are very compatible with the way I contend the public talks about immigrants today, which is in terms of illegal status. Taken from the discourse, since concerns about immigrant legal status are in fact synonymous with concerns about laws of citizenship, national identity models are the appropriate theoretical models to explain hostile immigration attitudes for policies where illegal immigrants are involved. Second, a threatened American identity explanation offers a value added over the existing national identity and social identity models by specifying how national identity can be explained as the behaviors arising from high status group dynamics. Finally, I am able to offer an important test of symbolic factors against each other, which has been absent across all existing explanations of hostile immigration attitudes. This final point, while it is more of an analytical critique, is important. It is reasonable to imagine someone might form prejudice against Hispanics, and then use this to form hostile immigration preferences.

This person is not always going to identify as a patriot. Similarly, a patriot might be willing to voice hostile immigration attitudes due to concerns about his important

45 national group identity. However, he might not be willing to express racially prejudicial sentiments against Latinos. These hypothetical individuals are offered to highlight that it is likely that racial prejudice and national identity act independently of one another to provoke hostility. Even if they are related, it seems unlikely that they will be direct proxies for one another. Despite this reasoning, it remains unclear whether these symbolic factors are truly independent, because scholars have yet to test this proposition.

While most studies include one symbolic factor per analysis, others have offered assumptions that one symbolic factor might act as a mediator for another symbolic variable. I argue that before we claim such assumptions, it is important to first test the hypothetical independent effects of racial prejudice and national identity factors.

Currently, it is unclear whether citizens lean predominantly upon their symbolic attachments to race or nation to make them more likely to express anti-immigrant attitudes. Employing a threatened American identity explanation will therefore improve upon past symbolic models by teasing out these effects and deciphering the predominant symbolic variable shaping hostile immigration attitudes.

Argument

I argue that threatened American identity explains, where existing theories cannot, why citizens express hostile immigration policy attitudes, and in particular why they express the most hostility toward illegal immigrants within their policy attitudes. My theory centers on the predispositions upon which citizens are most inclined to draw when expressing hostile attitudes (i.e., threats to national identity). Since the discussion in

America frequently surrounds illegal immigrants, citizens are likely to draw from their

46 concerns about national identity to express hostile attitudes. Americans often do so because they naturally link the discussion of illegality to citizenship, as citizenship laws are the important laws being broken. Going one step beyond a simple national identity explanation, I specify a distinct threat-based process that occurs during the draw from these national identity concerns.

Threatened American Identity (TAI) involves the notion that threat is perceived frequently among individuals with high status group identities (Sidanius et al. 1997;

Sidanius & Pratto 1999). Many patriotic Americans are easily threatened because they want to protect the perceived prestige of their American identity. I contend that threats are especially likely to flourish when citizens are faced with decisions about allocating membership benefits to non-members (or applicants). The impulse to protect valuable identities, and the threat that results, often translates into hostile immigration attitudes.

The fact that many citizens are more willing to express hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants is a function of perceiving illegal immigrants as violating the requirements for group acceptance, by not ‘demonstrating their desire’ to be American by residing in the U.S. legally. While there are still many Americans that most likely believe the opposite, that unauthorized immigrants demonstrate their ‘wanting’ to a large degree, a majority of Americans believe that illegal immigrants do not want to be American

(Knowledge Networks Survey 2010; P.I. Irfan Nooruddin14, YouGov Polimetrix Survey

2010; P.I. Paul Allen Beck15). It is my argument that this threat of perceived

(non)attachment can ultimately predict who is hostile and who is lenient in their

14 I authored several original questionnaire items on this survey, and contributed to the overall design of the survey that was ultimately fielded in September of 2010. 15 I was awarded funding through the Mershon Center at the Ohio State University to design and field the YGP survey questionnaire, which was fielded in August of 2010. 47 immigration policy attitudes.

By theorizing this distinctive threat-based process for high status group members, my original framework of threatened American identity adds nuance to existing national identity explanations of hostile immigration attitudes. I specifically draw on theories of social identity threat, which have yet to be applied to our understanding of hostile immigration attitudes, but which are salient to the discussion of would-be newcomers to high status groups. Social identity threat falls under social identity theory, but has evolved from the minimal frameworks offered by social identity theory (SIT) to provide an ideal approach for understanding hostile immigration attitudes in America.

Social Identity Theoretical Frameworks

Hostile reactions toward outsiders, and prejudicial behaviors more specifically, have often been explained using social identity theory (SIT) (Brown 1995; Chirot 2001;

Reynolds & Turner 2001; Tajfel & Turner 1979). According to these explanations, people attach themselves to important social groups by which they self categorize. They do this because of a natural psychological impulse to place themselves in relation to others. At times, this process can spur an intense ingroup loyalty that translates into prejudicial attitudes toward outgroup members (Adorno 1950; Sidanius & Pratto 1999;

Sheriff 1966; Tajfel & Turner 1979).16 Social identities that are activated under any context affect how an identifier views outsiders, and can therefore make prejudice toward

16 The tendency of individuals to personally identify oneself in relation to others is a central to human existence (Festinger 1954; Merton 1968). 48 outsiders more likely. 17 For example, if a person considers an important part of his self- identification to be as a doctor, then this identity might shape how he thinks about the world at any given point in time. According to this theory the doctor is likely to identity himself as a doctor if in a room with all teachers, because of a natural impulse to respond to the context in which he is placed by categorizing himself relative to others (by profession). Meanwhile, if the doctor is in a room with other doctors, this impulse makes it likely for him to identify with a non-doctor identity (i.e., as an avid Knicks fan while watching a sporting event). There is no longer a need to self-categorize as a doctor if everybody self-identifies as doctors; new categorizations must be utilized to make sense of oneself relative to the other groups represented in a given context. The argument made by many social identity theorists is that in the former scenario (identifying oneself as a doctor compared to teachers), there is a potential for an intense loyalty to be fostered that can influence the doctor to express prejudicial attitudes toward the teachers in the example. From this perspective, the doctor is more likely to form prejudicial attitudes toward teachers than if he was not thinking in terms of teachers and his own self-image as a doctor. All of this prejudice, then, stems from the importance the doctor places on his profession as an important social identity.

Applying social identity mechanisms to national identity and immigration would predict that self-categorizing as a patriot might similarly provoke prejudicial attitudes toward immigrants (i.e., since patriots might categorize immigrant outgroup members as

17 Social identities are fluid, and therefore may change given varying contexts, but can also be consistently salient depending upon how central a group identity is to how one categorizes oneself. For example, some group members might only identify themselves as a group member if they fell the situation calls for them to do so. Conversely, group members experiencing chronic discrimination might come to identify oneself as a member of that group on a daily basis (e.g., Blacks in America). 49 un-American in the context of immigration). Self-categorization explanations of hostile immigration attitudes have characterized personal attachment to one’s nation as a potentially powerful driving force (Tajfel & Turner 1979; Turner 1981). Although, in the realm of immigration attitudes, scholars have questioned the ability of personal attachment to automatically produce prejudice (See deFiguerido & Elkins’ 2003 “Are

Patriots Bigots?”). As a result, most researchers have begun to refine their application of social identity mechanisms. Specifically, scholars have started to characterize hostile attitude processes as strictly outgroup based in nature, in keeping with past work on prejudicial models in psychology (See Brewer 1998 for discussion of predominance of outgroup-based prejudice models). deFiguerido & Elkins (2003) found that holding a belief in superiority over other nations, otherwise known as nationalism, drives anti- immigrant sentiment. Meanwhile, the researchers found that being personal attached to one’s nation (e.g. self categorizing as a patriot), failed to relate significantly to these same anti-immigrant sentiments. Their conclusion, which matches the prevailing wisdom, is that opposition to immigration is associated more with these pejorative perceptions of outgroups (nationalism), and is not automatically the result of being personally attached to one’s nation (patriotism). However, there are reasons to question this finding.

According to this conclusion, if the doctor from the earlier example forms prejudicial attitudes toward teachers, it is due to pejorative perceptions about all non-doctor occupations making this prejudice more likely to be expressed, not because he automatically translates his personal attachment directly into prejudice. The problem with this characterization is that the doctor is most likely highly attached to the medical doctor profession, which then makes it possible for him to then consider all other non-doctor

50 professions as inferior to his own. In other words, both characterizations of social identity, whether more akin to simple self-categorization or nuanced to involve feeling superior to all other group identities, must operate together at some level. By not theorizing them to work together, we run the risk of understating the role of personal attachment in the process individuals go through to express their hostility toward immigrants.

Furthermore, previous national identity-based explanations that have drawn on SIT have been limited in explaining the hostilities that Americans are willing to express, which tend to be fixated on illegal immigrants. In the policy discussion on immigration in the United States, illegal and legal immigrants are both immigrant outgroups, but they happen to provoke different levels of expressed hostility. In fact, legal immigrants even provoke mainly favorable expressed attitudes. This divergent hostility suggests that illegal immigrants possess an outsider status that is unmatched by legal immigrants, at least in their ability to provoke prejudicial attitudes that citizens feel comfortable expressing. Current versions of SIT being applied to immigration attitudes cannot account for this disparity in hostility that is expressed, however. This is problematic, as explaining the willingness to express hostile attitudes toward particular immigrant groups can tell us what citizens value and think about when forming and ultimately expressing their attitudes.

High Status Social Identities

The immigration issue is especially relevant to high status group mechanisms, due to its applicant/member dimensions. Immigrants resemble applicants and citizens are

51 similar to established group members. Citizens are highly likely to claim ownership over this group, precisely because it is viewed as highly sought after and therefore valuable.

However, as a result, they are also more easily threatened by any possible factors that would lower the value of their high status group (Sidanius et al. 1997; Sidanius and Pratto

1999).

Applying these dynamics to immigration, American citizens can easily feel threatened for their group status if immigrants act in way that does not validate American membership as a highly sought after and desired identity. I will draw specifically on these group status dynamics laid out by social identity threat theory, as they explain hostility by members who are threatened by the behaviors of would-be newcomers (i.e., sometimes referred to as applicants). Scholars of social identity threat have demonstrated the high propensity for high status group members to feel threatened in this manner (deFiguerido

& Elkins 2007; Scheepers & Ellemers 2005; Scheepers 2009). Therefore, I now turn to social identity threat to explain further how status impacts hostility.

Social Identity Threat

When I apply social identity threat to American identity, I am able to explain why many Americans feel comfortable expressing hostile immigration attitudes, specifically about policies involving illegal immigrants. Under the theory of social identity threat, people consider high status identities to be valuable in their ability to demonstrate personal worth, in order to maintain self-esteem. 18 Under this theory, individuals

18 While high status can and does apply to various group identities (i.e., ones defined by realistic resources and more symbolic factors such as prestige), I draw on theories that have emphasized the high status that comes with highly sought after group memberships, which can involve both realistic and symbolic bases of 52 identifying with high status groups can essentially become ‘over-protective’ of these valuable identities, and derogate outgroup members who put their high status identity at risk of devaluation (Branscombe, Ellemers, et al. 1999; Scheepers & Ellemers 2005).

This devaluation, of course, is symbolic rather than realistic. Therefore, high status individuals very easily perceive threats.

In order to test these effects, studies have shown experimental observations of individuals experiencing lowered collective self-esteem once threats of identity devaluation are provoked, with the threats then resulting in outgroup derogation

(Branscombe & Wann 1994; Oakes & Turner 1980; Tamir & Nadler 2007; Turner 1999;

Walton & Cohen 2007). In one study, subjects were presented with a video of a boxing match between an American and a Russian. The outcome of the match (e.g., American boxer losing) decreased expressed collective self-esteem among high identifiers (e.g., patriots), but not among low identifiers. Lowered self-esteem ultimately led to outgroup derogation (Branscombe & Wann 1994). In this example, American patriots are threatened by a lowering of the value of their high status identity, which leads individuals to ultimately express anti-Russian attitudes. By drawing on the same theorized mechanisms of threats of social identity devaluation, I will put forth similar theoretical expectations about what leads Americans to take part in outgroup derogation of immigrants (e.g., hostile immigration attitudes).

Acceptance Threat

Branscombe and colleagues have identified numerous ways that social identity is status. Since immigrants are essentially viewed as applicants to nations, this member and applicant dynamic necessarily causes nationals to behave as members of a high status group. 53 perceived to be vulnerable to threats. All of them speak to the fears involved in identity devaluation, and can generally be applied to prejudice against immigrants. I further argue that they can be used to understand hostility specifically geared at illegal immigrants. According to Branscombe’s taxonomy, threats to social identity can fall under one of four categories: distinctiveness, categorization, value, or acceptance. I draw upon acceptance threat because it is a category of threat that can be applied to group dynamics that result when highly sought-after group memberships are involved (e.g., high status group identities). These dynamics are highly compatible with how American identity operates in the case of immigration. They also make reasonable predictions about the circumstances under which outgroup derogation can occur, when members are threatened by newcomers’ lack of demonstrations of loyalty and desire to be members.

This point is of particular importance, as I argue a fundamental complaint of most

Americans who voice hostile immigration attitudes pertains to the demonstration of immigrants wanting to be American.

As I will explain, a newcomer’s demonstration of loyalty and desire to be American has been widely equated with residing in the country legally. Hostility is targeted at illegal immigrants precisely because their lack of legal status is seen as bypassing the initial demonstration of desire to be members (e.g., not validating American membership as a highly sought after identity). This does not ignore the multitude of steps that might more realistically be involved with immigrant newcomers achieving approval from established members of the American ingroup. Most Americans have a very lofty criteria to be considered “one of us”, which goes well above the distinction of simple legal residence. However, it is more or less an initial screening method by which individuals

54 initially express hostile immigration attitudes before they might consider the issue in more depth. Since it is the most basic criteria by which I argue many Americans are willing to express hostile attitudes, I therefore theorize immigrant demonstration of

“wanting” to be American as being equivalent with a perception that immigrants are residing in the U.S. legally. In a more general sense, however, I attempt to posit theoretical expectations that reflect the overall high expectations Americans hold for newcomers seeking acceptance.

The concerns some citizens have over allotting beneficiary status to illegal immigrants mirrors almost exactly the dynamics of group acceptance. Within these dynamics, social identity acceptance operates in a way one would expect an exclusive club membership to function. Members of highly sought after groups (e.g., high status groups) expect newcomers to demonstrate recognition of ingroup worth. As one might suspect, established group members often have elevated expectations for those seeking acceptance. Like all exclusive groups, applicants are viewed as having to take these steps, however difficult these steps toward acceptance may be, to even to be considered for acceptance within the group. For example, “a certain set of skills must be obtained or milestones passed (e.g., a high-level degree for academic promotion), a probationary period must be served (e.g., in trade unions; sororities and fraternities), or particular acts taken, which are often personally dangerous, but convey loyalty to the group (e.g., criminal acts in the Mafia or urban street gangs)” (Branscombe et al. p. 51, 1999). Even after all of these steps are taken, they might not earn a would-be newcomer acceptance.

However, they are requirements to even be considered for acceptance.

While many newcomers might attempt to fulfill these types of expectations, others

55 cannot live up to the lofty expectations to ‘earn’ acceptance. Some newcomers may even have no interest in demonstrating loyalty or commitment to the group. When established members view newcomers as falling obviously short of demonstrating loyalty, members are likely to become threatened and then to derogate, reject, or even expel the newcomers. Outgroup derogation is therefore especially likely to occur when applicants to membership do not publicly recognize their loyalty and commitment to becoming members of the group (Branscombe et al 1999).19 Applying acceptance threat to how the

American public views immigrant newcomers, I contend that derogation is likely to occur towards illegal immigrants in particular. Derogation targeting illegal immigrants occurs since all illegal immigrants could be perceived as not demonstrating loyalty and desire to be American, by residing in the country illegally.

Legal immigrants might provoke such threats as well, as it is reasonable to assume that many established members of high status groups will not readily believe any immigrant newcomers demonstrate their desire enough to earn acceptance. However, I contend that if individuals hold these attitudes, they do so more internally (i.e., they do not find them appropriate attitudes to express). I contend that individuals are unwilling to express such opinions, because legal immigrants are widely discussed as going through great lengths to demonstrate the value they place on American identity by going through

19 Acceptance is a component of social identity threat that Branscombe et al. (1999) discuss as a threat that affects insecure members of social groups. I utilize its basic assumption about the value of demonstrating loyalty and a basic level of wanting to be an insider to inform my theory of threatened American identity. The other threats Branscombe et al. discuss are distinctiveness, value, and categorization threats. However, more recent tests of the impact of social identity threats on group member behavior have been simplified to a single threat of group devaluation. 56 legal channels to reside in the country.20

Demonstrating Wanting as Legally Residing

While my argument draws directly from social identity threat, it is clear that high expectations to earn acceptance have always been apparent in America. Expectations of acceptance have additionally entailed a minimal threshold of legal status. At the higher end of citizen expectations, Samuel Huntington claimed, “the distinctive status of citizenship was eroded by extension of the rights and privileges of citizens to noncitizens” (2004; p. 205). Huntington’s argument is that providing benefits even to immigrants that are not already citizens (e.g., naturalized citizens) erodes the symbolic distinctiveness of citizenship. While his view offers an extreme position, many

Americans agree with his argument at least in terms of immigrants that do not enter onto a pathway to gain formal acceptance to reside in the nation (e.g., illegal immigrants). In other words, they think that bestowing benefits specifically to illegal immigrants erodes the distinctiveness of American identity. Both sentiments, the extreme version favoring citizenship and the version favoring legal residence to merit group acceptance (and favorable treatment), speak to the expectation that immigrants demonstrate that they are attached, committed, and loyal to the nation. Both sentiments are indicative of the fact that individuals see formal legal distinctions as the only way to be sure of immigrants’ commitment to America, which individuals can use to positively differentiate their group relative to foreign groups.

20 Naturalization in particular signifies the importance immigrants have demonstrated that they place on American identity, because it signifies that these legal immigrants abide by important American identity norms, such as citizenship. 57 Following this reasoning, I contend that the concern about immigrants’ wanting to be American is actually a concern about immigrants demonstrating their attachment specifically through legal residence. My theory views perceptions that immigrants want to be American as synonymous with going through legal procedures to express this desire. There are various actions that immigrants can perform in order to be perceived as wanting under this definition. Successful demonstration of wanting to be American could entail waiting to enter the United States with permission from the American government after filling out the necessary paperwork, residing in the nation long enough to become eligible for citizenship tests, and finally, studying the history, laws, and

English language to then be able to pass the final citizenship tests. In other words, there is a continuum of potential (non)attachment under this definition, where even legal immigrants can be parsed out as more or less attached depending on whether they fulfill the various demonstrations of wanting. For instance, an immigrant may legally enter into the country, but then their length of residence might cause their attachment to the nation to be questioned by American citizens. Furthermore, legal immigrants could also be of questionable attachment if they do not study American culture and are not motivated to take the citizenship tests, despite their legal residence. The anti-immigrant sentiment of the past was most likely of this variety (i.e., focused on concerns about immigrant attachment, not specifically illegal immigrants). It is my claim that while the language surrounding immigration has changed to emphasize illegal immigrants, the preference for immigrants that are committed to the nation has remained steady in driving hostile attitudes. As discussed previously, this evolution of the way Americans talk about immigration occurred after wartime labor shortages and the prospect of amnesty both

58 faded away. Moreover, illegal immigrants provided a convenient group against which to express hostile attitudes. One could say that the anti-immigrant sentiments of the past therefore still exist, although are most likely hidden under the guise of the more socially appropriate cover of negativity toward illegal immigrants. While I focus ahead on the primary legal versus illegal distinction, there is evidence that many Americans do in fact see naturalized immigrants as more attached to American identity than foreign nationals, who both are seen as more attached than undocumented immigrants.21 This continuum of beliefs about immigrant (non)attachment overall suggests that Americans have incredibly high expectations for immigrants to demonstrate their attachment to the nation by fulfilling various steps toward taking legal steps to achieve American citizenship.22 As the largest gulf of beliefs about attachment is between illegal versus legal immigrants, I draw on this more common distinction to inform my theory.

21 Future research should incorporate the potential for these less common immigrant labels to therefore enter into the discussion of immigration, as the salient labels have been shown to shift throughout time, in addition to the more hostile forms of discourse in response to such labels. 22 An additional stipulation to my argument about immigrant (non)attachment is that I assume the majority of Americans under most circumstances do not question the attachment to national identity by “native” born Americans. For groups that were born in the United States, and especially if they are several generations removed from immigrant ancestors, I assume that most Americans will consider these “native” groups to have already demonstrated their attachment to being American. The reasoning behind this assumption is that individuals that stay in the country for multiple generations are perceived to have a long history of immersing themselves into the American culture, and are presumed to be established members within American society. This assumption is supported empirically as well, with most Americans rating high levels of personal attachment to the nation (KN 2010; YGP 20120; Schildkraut 2007; Theiss-Morse 2009). For the most part, immigration opponents are unlikely to question native-born Americans’ attachment to the nation, and are especially unlikely to view illegal immigrants as being as attached to the nation as native-born Americans. I claim that most hostile attitudes expressed are likely the result of citizens viewing illegal immigrants as being unwanting, and therefore forming hostile beliefs based upon this perceived (non)attachment to the nation. This hostility occurs because people believe that allowing unwanting illegal immigrants a beneficiary status similar to those who are wanting to be American, such as American citizens, would lower the value or distinctiveness of American status since illegal immigrants do not recognize the value of the social group identity. Ultimately, citizens believe this recognition entails demonstrating loyalty, commitment, and wanting to be American by going through the legal processes to migrate and reside in the country.

59 General Expectations

I seek to understand what causes individuals to express hostile immigration attitudes, particularly those implicating illegal immigrants. I ask this question to confront a puzzle that has emerged recently, where citizens are extremely willing to offer hostile policy attitudes toward illegal immigrants, while they are unwilling to voice any hostility toward legal immigrants. To address these questions, my Threatened American Identity theory expects that citizens will be willing to express hostile immigration attitudes when threats to identity are present, which is likely to occur in response to policies that implicate illegal immigrants. I expect that citizens who identify highly as Americans will feel their American identity is at risk of being devalued by allotting beneficiary status- or any lenient treatment- to illegal immigrants. I further expect that the same will not be true of hostility expressed about legal immigrants, as most Americans will express favorable views of legal immigrants. Finally, I expect that citizens who perceive immigrants not to want to identify as American will be associated with willingness to express hostile immigration policy attitudes in general. I contend that illegal immigrants pose a particularly acceptable outlet for hostile policy attitudes, because illegal immigrants are perceived as not wanting, demonstrating loyalty to, or placing value on American membership.

Hypotheses

Given this framework, primarily perceptions that immigrants are not attached to the American ingroup should trigger threat of identity devaluation, which will drive expressions of hostility. These effects should likewise work in concert with a baseline of

60 one’s personal attachment to the American ingroup to drive hostile immigration attitudes.

Overall, I expect that these effects will be heightened when illegal immigrants are the beneficiaries to policies (or are more realistically the targets of punitive measures).

I posit the following hypotheses:

“Immigrant (non)attachment hypothesis”: There will be a positive relationship between perceptions that immigrants are unattached to American identity and hostile immigration attitudes, ceteris paribus. Individuals who believe immigrants do not value or “do not want to have” an American identity will express more hostility than those who believe immigrants do value American identity. I therefore expect hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants to be the most obvious example of Americans responding to immigrant

(non)attachment.

“Personal attachment hypothesis”: There will be a positive relationship between national identity attachment and hostile immigration attitudes, ceteris paribus.

Individuals who are highly attached to their American identities will express more hostility for policies that are lenient on immigrants than those who are not highly attached to their American identity. Furthermore, I expect that attachment to the nation as expressed by centrality of American identity will further be associated with such hostile immigration attitudes.

“Interactive hypothesis”: Finally, given their assumed combined influence, I expect these effects to be conditional upon each other. I expect that the effect of immigrant

(non)attachment threat will be conditional upon higher levels of personal attachment threat: an increase in threat will lead to hostile immigration attitudes when personal attachment threat is high, ceteris paribus.

61

Looking Forward

The prevailing wisdom indicates that the American public stands in opposition to immigration, and that it expresses the most hostility toward illegal immigrants in particular. However, while existing explanations have adequately explained hostility toward immigrants at some times and the hostility Americans once held specifically toward policies that implicated legal immigrants at other times, the vast majority of explanations are unable to explain why most Americans are currently willing to express especially hostile opinions toward unauthorized immigrants. The question I seek to answer in this dissertation is why the American public is opposed to immigration, and why in particular many Americans are willing to express large levels of hostility in their support for punitive measures affecting illegal immigrants? In answering this question, I will confront whether more socially appropriate forms of hostility geared at illegal immigrants are driving hostile immigration policy attitudes. I further will confront whether Americans equate general immigration specifically with illegal immigrants.

62

Chapter 3: The Impact of Personal Attachment to American Identity on Restrictive Policy Attitudes

In this chapter, I will investigate whether citizens draw on their personal attachments to national identity to express support for restrictive immigration policies.

Throughout this dissertation, I contend that personal attachment and perceptions of immigrant (non)attachment work together to generate threats to American identity. The initial pathway to threat involves personal attachment, since citizens would not perceive an identity as being threatened if they did not first consider their identity valuable and were not strongly attached to it. Although there is an emerging scholarship on public opinion about immigration, there has not been a fully developed explanation for how individual level determinants affect attitudes toward immigration policies, particularly those targeting illegal immigrants. Instead, the literature has focused on either general opposition to immigration, which might have less relevance to policy discussion than an analysis of policy attitudes. In addition, most studies assume that the same predictors would affect attitudes toward legal and illegal immigrants, without any consideration for how predictors might vary with the evolving discourse that focuses on illegal immigrants

(Brader, Valentina, & Jardina 2010; Perez 2009). It is therefore important to expand upon this literature by investigating immigration policy attitudes in light of how individuals actually talk about immigrants today, through concerns about national identity and illegal immigrants.

63 I draw on different conceptions of attachment to determine whether the effects of personal attachment hold when tested against alternatively hypothesized determinants of hostility. I analyze feelings about a restrictive policy that would target illegal immigrants, followed by feelings about that same policy if it were to target legal immigrants. The results will demonstrate the largest effects arising from threatened American identity factors of personal attachment. Furthermore, they will demonstrate that modeling policy attitudes that implicate illegal immigrants explains the most variation in immigration policy attitudes. The findings suggest that an original measure of immigrant

(non)attachment is needed in order to test the full impact of threatened identity affecting immigration policy attitudes This chapter proceeds with a crucial investigation of the necessary element that makes threats of perceived immigrant (non)attachment possible, which is a strongly held personal attachment to one’s American identity.

Personal Attachment & Threats to American Identity

Citizen attachment to national identity and the various norms to which citizens adhere as a result of their personal attachments have been shown to produce hostile foreign and domestic policy attitudes (Schildkraut 2005; Theiss-Morse 2009). Most studies attempting to measure personal attachments to national identity reveal a complex web of variables. Their differing points of view are embodied throughout studies citing the patriotism/nationalism divide, the social theory of national identity, and the constitutive norms of national identity, indicating the difficult task scholars have faced in trying to operationalize variables of personal attachment to one’s nation.

64 One set of studies has examined the impact of patriotism and nationalism upon prejudicial attitudes against immigrants, citing the large impact of symbolic attachment to identities (deFiguerido & Elkins 2003; Citrin et al. 1997; Huddy & Khatib 2007; Parker

2009). Within these studies, patriotism is considered the positive side of attachment, and is operationalized as an affection or centrality of one’s self-categorization as an

American. Conversely, nationalism is considered the negative aspect of personal attachment to national identity, with scholars measuring the concept as feelings of superiority of one’s national identity over all nations. Within these studies, nationalism predicts restrictive attitudes, while patriotism does not. Theiss-Morse (2009) posits a similar divide in her social theory of national identity, which she uses to explain their use to express restrictive beliefs. She argues that attachment must be the function of self- proclaimed commitment to one’s nation, but more importantly, due to strict boundary drawing in terms of ‘who counts as an American’. The boundaries Theiss-Morse discusses are similar to the norms that Deborah Schildkraut’s work specifies (Schildkraut

2007, 2011; Theiss-Morse 2009).

Schildkraut’s initial study attempted to specify several constitutive norms of national identity (i.e., the factors citizens believe qualify someone to be a ‘true

American’). She describes four main traditions that are used to categorize the norms used to define a ‘true American’, which she argues can affect the level of hostile attitudes citizens are willing to express. Under the first tradition, civic republicanism, the norms include thinking of oneself as and feeling American, as well as volunteering, being

65 involved, and being informed about local and national politics.23 The civic republicanism tradition can be further broken into two subcategories of identity and active to provide a more accurate depiction of the norms’ abilities to provoke either inclusive or exclusive attitudes. Civic republican norms of identifying as an American are seen as exclusive attitudes (i.e., they can provoke prejudicial attitudes against those seen as ‘anti-

American’). Schildkraut views these civic republican norms as justifications by those who seek to further limit who counts as an American (Schildkraut 2007). More recently,

‘active’ civic republican norms related to participation in civic activities have been suggested to induce more inclusive opinions (Schildkraut 2011). Those who believe that one should be engaged in political affairs to be considered a true American tend to voice more inclusive attitudes, or at least less restrictive attitudes (i.e., adherence to active civic republicanism has been shown to be related to less anti-Arab policy attitudes in

Schildkraut’s 2011 analysis). The second tradition is liberalism, which includes norms of hard work, respect for institutions and the law, and a commitment to free speech. These have been linked to restrictive attitudes. The third tradition of ethnoculturalism is the most restrictive tradition, as it entails beliefs that a ‘true American’ should be born in

America, be white, Christian, and also have European ancestors (Smith). The fourth tradition is incorporationism, which includes norms of carrying on ethnic traditions, respecting differences, blending into society, and seeing people from all backgrounds as

American. Similarly to civic republicanism, incorporationism can be divided into two

23 The civic republicanism norms, as well as all other norms used in my analysis, come directly from Schildkraut (2007)’s analysis of components of Americanism. Civic republicanism measures were specifically added to the 21st Century Americanism Survey (2004) in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding for norms that had previously been found to be consequential for immigration opinion in America. 66 subcategories of acceptance and assimilation, where assimilation-based incorporationism is likely to provoke hostile attitudes versus the more inclusive forms of incorporationism that are based on acceptance. Finally, there is the “multiple traditions” category, which involves the norms of being a citizen and speaking English, which could fall under several of the other traditions, all of which predict hostile attitudes as a result of adhering to these norms (Smith 1988).

It is clear that there is not one perfect measurement of personal attachment, but that personal attachment can involve many different aspects. Any one individual may relate national identity and form an attachment to the nation in a unique way that differs from how other individuals might decide to attach themselves to the nation. In this chapter, I will draw from the previous scholarship’s most current understanding of personal attachment in order to analyze its hypothesized effect upon hostile immigration attitudes. I will draw from the measurements of attachment that are most relevant to my theoretical framework. Specifically, my theory calls for a focus on the personal attachments that speak to how central national identity is to one’s overall self- categorization. I therefore test whether these centrality-of-identity forms of personal attachment lead citizens to express restrictive immigration policy attitudes.

Restricting Access to Medicaid & Food Stamps

A good place to start examining the determinants of restrictive attitudes lies in the realm of social policy. Federal policy regarding immigrant access to Medicaid & food stamps is a particularly relevant social policy in the immigration debate. Federal government stipulations as to whether immigrants can be granted access to these services

67 have led to considerable debate and changes in policy since these services were established (Bernard 1980; Espenshade & Huber 1998). Scholars involved in the discussion of immigration and politics have also discussed this social policy in depth

(Citrin et a. 1997; Espenshade 1996-97, 1998; Schildkraut 2011). Citrin and colleagues used policy about Medicaid & food stamps to provide a comprehensive analysis of economic motivations of immigration opinion, citing the expectation that economic motivations likely had in shaping restrictive preferences. Given that this policy is still relevant to the discussion about government services, I expect economic motivations to play the same role that they did in the past, providing a strong test to my own competing claims of threatened American identity driving hostile policy attitudes.

Similarly, this policy can still be used to provide a stringent test to my theoretical expectations of threatened American identity due to its potential link to racial attitudes.

Attitudes about food stamps in particular most likely bear a similarity with citizen perceptions about welfare, given that food stamps are a form of welfare. Public opinion scholars have shown restrictive welfare attitudes to be highly linked to racial prejudice

(Berinsky 2002; Gilens 1999; Federico 2004; Winter 2006). For example, Gilens’ work on the subject provided a strong indication of the association of negative attitudes about poverty and welfare with images of ‘welfare queen’ stereotypes (Gilens 1999). In a similar vein, one would therefore expect racial prejudice to be positively related to restrictive attitudes about whether or not immigrants received food stamps. The only exception would most likely be that it is no longer prejudice against Blacks that would be driving attitudes about immigrants receiving services, but rather prejudice against Latinos or generalized prejudice against racial minorities. Considering that both factors most

68 likely relate highly with attitudes about providing access to governmental services of

Medicaid & food stamps, I consider the policy as an appropriate one in order to provide a stringent test to my personal attachment expectations.

Hypotheses

To reiterate the general expectations of this chapter’s empirical analysis, hostile reactions are expressed when citizens feel their American identity is being threatened by the risk of devaluation, occurring in response to allotting beneficiary status to immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants.24 Therefore, strong personal attachment should be positively related to hostile preferences, but especially for policies restricting illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants pose a particularly acceptable outlet for hostile feelings about immigrants as a whole. Illegal immigrants are seen as obvious perpetrators of failing to demonstrate their attachment to the nation, primarily because illegal immigrants do not go through proper legal channels to reside in the nation. I therefore state the following hypothesis that will be tested in the forthcoming analysis:

“Personal attachment hypothesis”: There will be a positive relationship between national identity attachment and hostile immigration attitudes, ceteris paribus.

Individuals who are highly attached to their American identities will express more hostile preferences than those who are not highly attached to their American identity.

Furthermore, I expect that strong attachment will further be associated with particularly restrictive attitudes when illegal immigrants are viewed as the beneficiaries of policy.

Empirical Approach

24 This assertion equating threat to one of identity devaluation is supported by the theory of social identity threat (Aronson and McGlore 2009; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson 2002). 69 In order to test my theoretical expectations, I draw on an existing survey of immigration and national identity attitudes. The 21st Century Americanism Survey is a random-digit-dial survey that was conducted by the Social and Economic Sciences and

Research Center at Washington State University over a period of time from summer to fall of 2004.25 It includes a sample of 2,800 respondents (1,633 white; 300 black; 441

Latino; 299 Asian), and is the most useful existing data source for the purposes of testing my hypotheses, due to its emphasis on improved measurements of American identity attachment over those of the 1996 and 2004 GSS. The survey also contains at least one direct comparison of legal to illegal immigration-related policy attitudes, in addition to the sample being fairly representative of the national demographic breakdowns for age, race, nativity, and median family income (Schildkraut 2007).

Dependent Variable

The dependent variables are questions on the 21-CAS survey about limiting immigrant access to government services. The exact wording of the first question is,

“Do you think that people who immigrated LEGALLY should be allowed to benefit from government assistance programs like Medicaid and food stamps?” The same question also asks the respondents if they support or oppose people who immigrated

‘ILLEGALLY’ benefiting from these same government programs. I generated two

‘hostile toward legal immigrants’ and ‘hostile toward illegal immigrants’ variables which equaled two if respondents answered ‘No, not allowed’, one if ‘Depends’, and zero if

‘Yes, allowed’. To reiterate, this service-based dependent variable was perfectly suited to

25The Principal Investigator of the study was Deborah Schildkraut (Tufts University). 70 test the primary expectations against the competing hypothesis of racial prejudice, and also economic competition. As Medicaid & Food Stamps restrictions are thought to prime racial attitudes, as well as attitudes about the fiscal burden of any services, these competing explanatory variables should have large impacts upon support for restrictions within this policy arena.

Independent Variables

The primary independent variables of my analysis were based on questions that asked about each respondent’s personal attachment to national identity, in multidimensional terms and general feelings about the importance one placed upon

American identity personally. The exact wording of the question that attempted to capture respondent attachment to the multidimensional components of American identity was, “Would you say that the following things should be very important, somewhat important, somewhat unimportant, or very unimportant in making someone a true

American? [thinking of oneself as an American] [Having American citizenship].” I made two variables, which equal four if the respondent strongly agreed, three if somewhat agreed, two if somewhat disagreed, and one if strongly disagreed with the national identity norms. These norms were chosen, because they seem to adequately capture the centrality of American identity to a citizen’s self categorization (e.g., social identity).

The vast majority of the sample fell into agreement with these norms, with over two- thirds of respondents strongly agreeing that a person ought to think oneself American in order to be a true American, and over three-quarters believing one should be a citizen to be considered a true American. A third question was used to capture more general

71 predispositions of personal attachment to the nation on the part of respondents. The wording of the question was, “Please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree: I am proud to be American.” I formed a ‘pride’ variable coded as four if one strongly agreed, three if somewhat agreed, two if somewhat disagreed, and four if one strongly disagreed. Similarly to the other two measures of personal attachment, a large majority of the respondents agreed to being proud to be

American. Over eighty percent of respondents offered strong agreement with the statement about being proud to identify as Americans. The three primary variables suggest that the sample had high levels of personal attachment to the nation.

The 21-CAS survey also contained information on the race, gender, education, household income, religious identification, regional location, and political opinions of the respondents. Individuals were asked to identify their racial background. I used this question first to omit Hispanic respondents from the analysis, and also to create a dichotomous variable for Black respondents across my analysis. Black identification has been linked to both hostile and lenient immigration attitudes, depending upon which type of immigration policies are being discussed (See Brader 2011 for a discussion about

Black Americans and immigration policy attitudes). Labor market competition hypotheses predict Black citizens to express hostile attitudes, whereas general identification as marginalized group members in society predicts more lenient immigration attitudes (Gay 2007; Scheve & Slaughter 2001; Fetzer 2007). The question pertaining to education was coded according to a 1-7 ordered scale, where one indicated a respondent had not completed high school, and seven indicated a post-graduate degree.

72 Individuals were also asked their family income along a scale of 15 income “brackets”, with intervals from $5,000 to $50,000.

Another question included in the 21-CAS survey asked the respondent’s religious affiliation. I recoded this question as equal to one if a respondent could be identified as an Evangelical Protestant, and zero otherwise. ‘Evangelical epicenters’ have been singled out by Pew as groups that offer particularly fierce opposition to immigration in

America (Pew Hispanic Research Center 2009). Since Evangelical identification is potentially an important hostility-provoking demographic distinction, I therefore included it as a dummy variable to provide a stringent test to my theoretical claims. For similar reasons, I generated a dichotomous variable for residence in a border state. I included a

‘border state’ variable, as opposed to a ‘southern’ variable, because of the importance that has been placed upon proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border in provoking hostile immigration views (Abrejano & Singh 2009; Dunaway et al. 2010). I include it as another hostility-provoking distinction against which to test my theory.

In terms of political variables, the 21-CAS survey had a question on self-reported political ideology, where respondents were asked to locate themselves on a scale ranging from one for liberal to three for conservative. I used this question to create a conservatism variable. The 21-CAS survey also had a question on self-reported partisan identification that asked respondents to identify on a scale ranging from one for strong

Republican, two for weak Republican, three for Independent leaning Republican, four for true Independent, five for Independent leaning Democrat, six for weak Democrat, and seven for strong Democrat. I reverse coded this question to create a Republican partisanship variable.

73 I created variables of the main alternative explanations based on questions about feelings about America as a non-white nation, as well as agreement that paying taxes is an obligation one owes other Americans. The exact wording of the question meant to gauge prejudice was, “The idea of an America where most people are not white bothers me”. From respondent responses, I created a ‘racial prejudice’ variable, which equals four if the respondent strongly agrees, three if somewhat agrees, two if somewhat disagrees, and one if the respondent strongly disagrees. This measure of racial prejudice was thought to be roughly synonymous with other popular racial prejudice measures

(Bobo & Kluegel 1997; Kinder & Sanders 1996). Theories of symbolic racism have demonstrated that the belief that Black Americans are to blame for their disadvantaged status causes individuals to oppose policies that benefit Black Americans (Sears &

Kinder 1971; Kinder & Sears 1981; Kinder & Sanders 1996). Similarly, social dominance theories have demonstrated that White Americans’ preference for maintaining unequal status hierarchies has led individuals to oppose policies that benefit racial minorities (Sidanius & Pratto 1999). All racial prejudice measures share in common a preference of White Americans to positively differentiate themselves from racial minority groups. Therefore, agreement with being bothered by a non-White America is an appropriate measure for general racial prejudice. In future chapters, I also use an measure of support for a policy of racial profiling, which captures these orientations toward blaming minorities and positive differentiation of Whites from marginalized group members that are supposed to be tapped by racial prejudice measures. The

‘economic’ variable I constructed was based on a question that asked, “Please tell me if this is an obligation you owe other Americans: [Paying taxes].” ‘Yes’ responses were

74 coded with the value of 2, ‘Depends’ as 1, and ‘No’ responses were coded as having a value of 0. While drawing on this existing survey data limited the available options of economic variables, this measure adequately captures the dimension of concerns about financial burden to the nation. This has been cited by scholars as being a primary concern of economic competition in the immigration issue (Calavita 2006; Mayda 2009).

Focusing on national level economic concerns also represents an improvement upon the labor market competition measure of unemployment, which was shown to be consistently insignificant across all analyses performed in this dissertation. This is consistent with previous evidence that demonstrates national-level factors to be more important than personal economic competition factors in driving hostile immigration attitudes (See

Citrin et al 1997). In the chapters ahead, I will continue to focus on measures of economic competition that capture the impact of concerns about the national economy’s well being.

A third competing theory to my own theory of Threatened American Identity is that Americans express hostility toward illegal immigrants because they are strong adherents to the law. In other words, obedience to the law drives hostile immigration attitudes. I initially included a measure for ‘rule of law’ across all analyses. However, due to its weak performance, I omitted it from the final presentation of results in this chapter’s analysis. Additionally, this same pattern of insignificance caused me to omit

‘rule of law’ variables from the analyses presented in Chapters Four and Five.

Model

75 The analyses utilized Ordered Probit estimation with robust standard errors on the following models:

[I] I = α + β2P + β3R + β6E + β7C + ε

[II] L = α + β2P + β4R +β5E + β6C + ε

where, I= support for restricting illegal immigrant access to Medicaid & Food Stamps;

L= support for restricting legal immigrant access to Medicaid & Food Stamps; P= personal attachment to nation (e.g. citizen, think, and pride variables); R= Racial prejudice; E= economic factors; and C= control variables.

Results

I estimated restrictive preferences about Medicaid & food stamps, using support for restricting access to illegal immigrants and legal immigrants as dependent variables, limiting my analysis to non-Hispanic U.S. citizen respondents. The results of the Ordered

Probit analyses are displayed in Table 3.2. I first analyzed the bivariate correlations among all variables before controlling for all factors. The results of a full pair-wise correlation analysis are displayed in Table 3.1.

In Table 3.1., there are stronger correlations within personal attachment variables than between personal attachment and the alternative variables, which suggests that the construct of personal attachment is valid. In columns and rows Three to Five, the interrelationships among personal attachment variables of ‘citizen’, ‘think’, and ‘pride’ resulted in correlation coefficients of 0.19, 0.23, and 0.30 (p<0.01). The correlations of main variables to racial prejudice were signficant but weak, with coefficients of 0.06,

76 0.08, and 0.12 (p<0.05). The main variables also correlated with the economic variables weakly (significant but smaller coefficients of 0.06, and 0.08, p<0.05). These bivariate relationships suggest that the personal attachment variables are not acting as proxies for racial prejudice or economic competition, since racial and economic factors do not correlate very strongly with the main variables. Furthermore, the primary attachment variables in this analysis result in the largest correlations with one another, which suggest that together, they form a distinct construct.

77

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1. Restrict Illegal ----

2. Restrict Legal -0.16 ----

3. Citizen 0.29 -0.10 ----

4. Think 0.22 -0.06 0.30 ----

5. Pride 0.21 -0.05 0.19 0.23 ----

6. Racial 0.13 -0.12 0.12 0.08 0.06 ----

7. Economic 0.04 0.06 0.04 0.08 0.06 -0.02 ----

8. Border state 0.10 -0.03 0.10 0.05 0.08 0.02 -0.06 ----

9. Evangelical 0.09 -0.06 0.10 0.06 0.10 0.02 -0.04 0.15 ----

10. Republican 0.28 -0.12 0.16 0.16 0.12 0.10 0.03 0.04 0.13

11. Conservative 0.24 -0.08 0.18 0.16 0.17 0.11 0.04 0.06 0.15

12. Income 0.05 0.01 0.03 0.02 0.03 0.05 0.03 0.00 -0.05

13. Education -0.11 0.11 -0.13 -0.12 -0.08 -0.08 0.06 -0.06 -0.15

14. Unemployed -0.02 0.00 0.02 0.00 -0.04 0.01 -0.01 -0.04 0.03

15. Female 0.00 -0.02 0.06 0.08 0.01 -0.12 0.05 0.03 0.05

16. Black -0.04 0.02 0.05 -0.05 0.00 -0.07 -0.07 0.31 0.15

CONT. ONTO NEXT PAGE

TABLE 3.1: PAIR-WISE CORRELATION MATRIX

78 TABLE 3.1 CONT. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 10. Republican ----

11. Conservative 0.51 ----

12. Income 0.08 0.02 ----

13. Education -0.04 -0.09 0.12 ----

14. Unemployed -0.03 -0.02 -0.02 -0.10 ----

15. Female -0.08 -0.04 0.01 -0.06 0.04 ----

16. Black -0.15 -0.05 -0.06 -0.11 0.07 0.06 ----

The main dependent variables of preference for restricting Medicaid & food stamp access for illegal immigrants, and then legal immigrants, had significant correlations with nearly all primary and alternative variables. In column One of Table

3.1, support for restricting illegal immigrants was most strongly correlated with the personal attachment variables (coefficients of 0.29, 0.22, 0.21, p<0.01). Preferences were also signfiicantly correlated to racial prejudice (0.13, p<0.01), although this correlation was weaker than the correlation with the main variables of personal attachment. At first glance, the bivariate relationships therefore suggest threatened American identity expectations merit further testing, as these variables yield the largest and most signfiicant correlations to Medicaid preferences. Additionally, Table 3.1 demonstrates two interesting patterns that emerge when moving from support for restricting illegal immigrants (Column One of Table 2.1) to legal immigrants (Column Two of Table 2.1).

First, the personal attachment variables are still significant, but are smaller and correlate 79 negatively to the restrictive Medicaid preference. The same is also true of the correlations that emerge with racial prejudice, which move from a positive correlation with support for restricting illgeal immigrants to a negative correlation with support for restricting legal immigrants (coefficients of 0.13 for ‘restricting illegal immigrants’, and -

0.12 for ‘restricting legal immigrants’, p<0.01). This suggests that the main theorized predictors of hostility toward illegal immigrants are correlated with lenient policy attitudes once legal immigrants are the implicated immigrant group. Second, whereas racial prejudice was strongly correlated with restricting illegal while allowing legal immigrants access to Medicaid & food stamps, personal attachment variables are only correlated strongly with the illegal immigrant specific variable. Racial prejudice therefore appears to have a stronger correlation with hostile attitudes targeting legal immigrants relative to the weak correlation from personal attachment. These patterns are interesting if they hold under the supposition of controls, as they would contradict past scholarship’s tendency to assume that predictors of hostility can be used to form the same theoretical expectations for illegal and legal immigrants.

Not surprisingly, Table 3.1 also demonstrates a strong and positive correlation between Republican partisanship and conservative ideology (0.51, p<0.01). In Rows Ten and Eleven, Republican and conservative variables were shown to be significantly correlated with the main variables of interest, and also with racial prejudice. The education, border state, and Evangelical variables were also significantly correlated with the primary variables. Despite their significance, none of these control variables were correlated strongly enough to the main or alternative variables to suspect threatened

American identity, racial prejudice, or economic competition variables to be acting as

80 proxies for any of these other relevant political or demographic variables. The prevailing wisdom up until this point has been that partisan leanings in particular fail to explain immigration attitudes since immigration is a complex issue about which partisans are conflicted. However, the argument about immigration being a non-partisan issue may no longer be valid given the current political climate. The immigration issue is constantly evolving to define a greater ability for partisan stances to be developed quickly. In particular, it is my intution that Republicans have developed consistently restrictive stances on immigration over the past decade. I will therefore pay attention to this control variable in the forthcoming multivariate analysis to see whether my analysis supports my intuition that Republican partisanship will yield a positive effect upon support for restrictive immigration policies.

Multivariate Results

In Table 3.2, I analyzed the determinants of attitudes in favor of restricting access to Medicaid & Food Stamps, first for legal immigrants and then for illegal immigrants, accounting for a number of individual-level demographic and immigration-related controls. The first model omitted all variables that were not the primary threatened

American identity explanatory variables to explain support for denying legal immigrant access to Medicaid & Food Stamps. The TAI variables are listed in Table 3.2 under

Personal Attachment. In the second model, I introduced the alternative racial and economic variables, and control variables. Next, I replaced the dependent variable with the preference for restricting illegal immigrant access to Medicaid & food stamps, while omitting all but the primary TAI variables (Model Three). In the fourth model, I continue

81 to model hostile attitudes about illegal immigrants, incorporating all alternative and control variables.

As expected, the strongest statistical findings emerged from the effect of personal attachment within the illegal immigrant-specific Models (Three and Four). In Model

Four, under the supposition of full controls, the personal attachment variables resulted in positive and highly significant coefficients. They outperformed all other variables in the model, with larger coefficients of 0.72 for the ‘think’ (p<0.001), 1.06 pride (p<0.001), and citizen variables outperforming all other variables in the model with a coefficient of

1.36 (p<0.001).26 In comparison, the racial prejudice variable resulted in a smaller and less significant coefficient for the ‘illegal’ models, which was just over half the size of the smallest effect of personal attachment (0.47, p<0.05). The alternative explanatory variable for economic competition performed the worst out of the alternative factors, resulting in small and insignificant coefficients. The findings suggest that belief that

American identity is an important social identity makes individuals more willing to offer restrictive policy attitudes, for policies that implicate illegal immigrants. This finding offers strong evidence to confirm the personal attachment hypothesis under the original theory of Threatened American Identity. Individuals are likely to offer hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants due to their strong personal attachments to national identity, and are more likely to draw on these attachments than to draw on the predispositions of

26 Their inclusion in the model also offers a conservative assessment of any single personal attachment variable’s explanatory power. Estimating the full model with only one personal attachment variable does not lower the significance of the personal attachment findings. The only change in this less inclusive estimation is an increase in the coefficient size for each personal attachment variable. Estimating the models in this way does not in any way alter the significance or size of the alternative and control variables. This essentially means that all personal attachment variables are powerful independent predictors of hostile policy attitudes that implicate illegal immigrants.

82 racial prejudice or economic beliefs. While at first glance, this effect appears to only to speak to attitudes about illegal immigrants (e.g., and not legal immigrants), I interpret these findings as confirmatory of expectations about personal attachment affecting generalized immigration attitudes as well. Personal attachment’s effect on generalized attitudes is corroborated in this chapter due to the fact that respondents will be demonstrated to think solely in terms of illegal immigrants when expressing any policy attitude, even when respondents are specifically asked to think about legal immigrants.

According to this finding, personal attachment effects will therefore occur in response to generalized immigration policy similarly to the models that specifically implicate illegal immigrants.

In Table 3.2, one can see this effect where individuals imagine illegal immigrants when forming both types of immigration policy attitudes. For example, modeling hostility for illegal immigrants explains nearly three times the amount of the variation in citizen attitudes than the models of hostility for legal immigrants. In Model Two, modeling hostility for legal immigrants under the full inclusion of controls explains relatively little variation in respondent attitudes, with an R squared value of 0.05. By contrast, the same model applied to hostility for illegal immigrants results in an R squared of 0.14. The fit of the model clearly improved when the predictors theorized to explain generalized immigration attitudes were applied to policies associated with illegal, as opposed to legal immigrants. The implication of this finding is that Americans simply do not have the well-formed and coherent attitudes about legal immigrants that they do about policies that are motivated by curbing illegal immigration. An important take away point of Table 3.2 is therefore that attitudes about illegal immigrants signify a basic level

83 of relevance to public opinion on immigration policy that attitudes about policies affecting legal immigrants simply lack.27 Therefore, hostile immigration attitudes are really best explained by examining opinion that is specifically geared toward policies affecting illegal immigrants. This is a new perspective that is currently not offered by the current scholarship, which presumes that isolating hostile attitudes toward either legal or illegal immigrants should result in similar effects.

The lack in variation explained by the Legal Models is accompanied by another finding that speaks to the predominant image of illegal immigrants when citizens voice their opinions on immigration policy. When comparing the ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’ models, most of the signs on the coefficients for variables in the ‘legal’ models surprisingly reverse when switching focus to ‘illegal’ attitudes. In Models One and Two, higher personal attachment, increased levels of racial prejudice, and identification as a

Republican all made respondents significantly less likely to express support for restricting access to legal immigrants. More intuitively, Models Three and Four demonstrated these factors made respondents more likely to express support for restricting access to legal immigrants. At first glance, this finding should seem puzzling.

Why would factors that scholars have consistently theorized to explain hostile immigration attitudes turn out to predict lenient attitudes about legal immigrants? When confronted with policies that are supposed to only affect legal immigrants, respondents continue to draw upon their predispositions to express seemingly lenient attitudes.

27 Replicating a nearly identical model using original 2010 survey data results in an R squared of 0.14 for preferences of restricting illegal immigrant access to Medicaid & Food Stamps, and 0.07 for restrictive preferences implicating legal immigrants (P.I. Irfan Nooruddin, Knowledge Networks). There is, however, a divergent trend in 2010 where the majority of respondents supported granting legal immigrants with access to these benefits. This represents a reversal of what the majority of respondents on the 2004 21- CAS preferred, which was still to restrict access even to legal immigrants. 84 However, respondents are predominantly drawing on hostility provoking factors to form these lenient attitudes, which suggests that they are continuing to use these factors to express hostility, although in a nuanced manner. In this case, hostility toward illegal immigrants is the motivation behind the seemingly lenient attitudes voiced about legal immigrants. In all likelihood, citizens who are prone to being hostile toward immigrants do not truly comprehend what a ‘legal immigrant’ even is, and voice opinions about what they imagine to be the opposite of an illegal immigrant. The low amount of variation the model of legal attitudes explains certainly corroborates this characterization of how the respondents are coming to their hostile attitudes. Overall, the results suggest that illegal immigrants continue to be the group that they draw on to form and express their immigration attitudes. Both the low variation explained by the legal models, in addition to the negative coefficients resulting when we should see positive ones, suggests that citizens cannot be moved away from imagining illegal immigrants when voicing immigration policy attitudes.28 This is important, as the evidence also demonstrates that the main driver of hostile attitudes alluding to illegal immigrants is personal attachment to the nation.

28 I have come to this conclusion as the result of the weaknesses of the alternative conclusion, which would be that predictors of legal and illegal immigration attitudes are completely different. This seems unlikely, as recent scholarship has provided consistent evidence that immigration attitudes, whether implicating illegal or legal immigrants, share in common the same predictors (Brader, Valentino, & Jardina 2010; Perez 2009). Alternatively, I offer an explanation that when respondents are asked to express opinions about the same policy attitudes toward legal versus illegal immigrants, the attitudes they voice about the policy affecting legal immigrants is dependent upon the attitude individuals express about the policy regarding illegal immigrants. Previous scholarship has typically used divergent dependent variables to measure policy attitudes implicating legal versus illegal immigrants, therefore they have not found this interesting pattern. My analyses cannot provide definitive proof that the predictors are the same, however. More testing is therefore needed to determine whether illegal versus legal attitude predictors are in fact the same.

85 1.Legal 2.Legal 3.Illegal 4.Illegal

Threatened American Identity Personal Attachment Citizenship to be American -0.91*** -0.91*** 1.62 *** 1.36*** (0.22) (0.28) (0.18) (0.21) Thinking self American -0.21 0.04 1.02*** 0.58*** (0.19) (0.23) (0.17) (0.21) American pride -0.25 -0.31 0.71*** 1.06*** (0.20) (0.27) (0.14) (0.17) Racial Bothered by thought of ------0.74*** ----- 0.47** Non-white America (0.24) (0.23) Economic ----- 0.24 ------0.20 Paying taxes is (0.13) (0.16) fundamental

Controls Republican ------0.35*** ----- 0.81*** (0.12) (0.13) Border state ----- 0.02 ----- 0.26*** (0.08) (0.09) Evangelical ------0.09 ----- 0.10 (0.07) (0.08) Source: 21st Century Americanism Survey (2004, P.I. Deborah Schildkraut). Restricted to non- Hispanics. Control variable outputs are presented on the following page. Continued on Next Page

TABLE 3.2. DETERMINANTS OF SUPPORT FOR RESTRICTING IMMIGRANT ACCESS TO MEDICAID

86 TABLE 3.2 CONTINUED

1.Legal 2.Legal 3.Illegal 4.Illegal

Controls: Conservative ---- -0.15 ---- 0.50*** (0.15) (0.15) Income ----- 0.00 ---- 0.48 (0.01) (0.31) Education ----- 0.62*** ----- 0.31 (0.15) (0.31) Unemployed ------0.07 ----- 0.05 (0.15) (0.23) Female ----- 0.00 ----- 0.11 (0.07) (0.17) Black ---- 0.00 ------0.36 (0.00) (0.20)

Pseudo R-squared 0.01 0.05 0.08 0.14 p-value 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 N 2274 1702 2264 1696

87 Considering the results of Table 3.2 together, I am able to demonstrate an instance where personal attachment to the nation predicts hostility against illegal immigrants, while predicting leniency in policy attitudes that specifically implicate legal immigrants. The results of this chapter are therefore able to offer a strong confirmation of the initial personal attachment hypothesis. Being attached to one’s national group, and specifically viewing it as a central identity that defines oneself, leads individuals to increasingly support restrictions on illegal immigrant access to government services.

Discussion

Previous scholarship has shown that attachments to national identity have led to hostile attitudes about immigrants and immigration policy (deFiguerido & Elkins 2003;

Schildkraut 2011; Wright & Citrin 2011). However, these studies have not analyzed how altering a beneficiary group within a policy might impinge upon individual-level willingness to express hostile policy attitudes. Nor have scholars been able to engage in a discussion about the meaning behind the public’s willingness to offer hostile attitudes implicating certain immigrant groups, but not others. Instead, scholars have conflated illegal and legal immigrants in their use of generalized measures, in addition to discussing generalized policies incorrectly as legal immigrant-targeted policies (Citrin et al . 1997). This is problematic, given that the current discourse surrounds immigration reform that is specifically geared towards curbing illegal immigration. In order to address this current limitation in the scholarship, this chapter demonstrated how the public views policies that implicate legal versus illegal immigrant groups as the beneficiaries. Importantly, strong evidence was presented to demonstrate that individuals

88 who are high in personal attachment to their nation were likely to voice hostile attitudes toward policies where illegal immigrants were the beneficiaries. This was shown to be true when tested against theories of racial prejudice and economic competition. Contrary to the assumptions made by past literature, the findings also demonstrated that personal attachment was significantly related to favorable attitudes toward a policy where legal immigrants were beneficiaries.

These findings are the first of their kind, and have important implications concerning which group individuals imagine when they form and express their policy attitudes. At first, it is a puzzling finding as to why the factors normally associated with hostility toward immigrants, regardless of legal status, would predict lenient policy attitudes at all. The only explanation is that voicing leniency for policies that benefit legal immigrants is actually being used by individuals as a way of voicing disfavor for policies that benefit illegal immigrants. This chapter’s findings therefore have important implications for public opinion on immigration, as they suggest that no matter how hard we attempt to parse out individual-level policy attitudes that implicate legal immigrants, respondents will find a way to express attitudes that are actually about illegal immigrants.

The evidence concerning the fit of the models further corroborated this effect, suggesting respondents to have overall more strongly held together attitudes about policies that implicate illegal immigrants.

The next chapters will expand upon this analysis, by examining whether attitudes about relevant and current policy measures, which frequently implicate illegal immigrants as the beneficiaries or as the targets of punishment, are driven by other factors of national identity that make threat and hostility more likely. This chapter’s

89 findings suggested respondents were especially willing to express restrictive attitudes for policies that implicated illegal immigrants. This provides initial support to the second hypothesis of immigrant (non)attachment, which claims that respondents do so because they perceive illegal immigrants are worthy of hostility because they demonstrate their

(non)attachment to the nation, through illegal residence. Comparing policies targeting illegal and legal immigrants was therefore useful in providing some intuition that the second factor of threat was at play. However, this analysis is not equipped to confirm that it is not some other effect associated with illegal status that led citizens to voice hostility. Despite the fact that this chapter demonstrated convincingly that personal attachment was the greatest predictor of policy attitudes about illegal immigrants, there is still a need for a more direct test of the subsequent mechanisms of Threatened American identity. In order to provide a more thorough test of the full spectrum of TAI variables, the next chapter will provide a formal test of the second hypothesized factor of threatened

American identity. In doing so, I will analyze more recent citizen attitude regarding a highly relevant immigration measure, Arizona’s restrictive SB 1070.29

29 To reiterate, my argument regarding restrictive policies targeting illegal immigrants is that providing benefits to immigrants who can be viewed as unwanting of American ingroup status can translate into threats of cheapening the perceived value and privileges of citizenship. Illegal status essentially allows citizens an avenue to question immigrant commitment and loyalty to the national ingroup, since illegal immigrants can be perceived as unconcerned with the United States’ standards of group acceptance, involving at a most basic level legal residence. 90

Chapter 4: Testing the Mechanisms of Threatened American Identity on Support for Arizona’s SB 1070

The analysis now turns to an investigation of whether citizens draw from perceptions about immigrant (non)attachment to formulate hostile policy attitudes. In addition to personal attachment effects, the theory of threatened American identity predicts strong effects from negative perceptions of outsiders due to the dynamics of group acceptance specified by social identity threat. These dynamics make it likely for many Americans, who set a high bar for acceptance, to form hostile opinions toward outsiders trying to gain the group’s favor (i.e., at least to the point where the outsiders may gain entrée into receiving membership services or ‘favorable’ and/or non-punitive treatment). Chapter Three successfully demonstrated that these same dynamics correctly predicted that citizens are initially likely to draw on their personal attachment to express hostile attitudes. This Chapter draws from an original data set to test the Immigrant

(Non)attachment Hypothesis. Using my own survey, I was able to ask a national sample of U.S. respondents whether they perceived immigrants as wanting to be American, and whether immigrants that do not want to be American or remain loyal to their homeland over America threaten them. While one might assume that immigrants who risk residing in the U.S. obviously desire to be American, the majority of respondents in my survey

91 believe the opposite, which is that illegal immigrants do not want to be American. The results of this chapter will demonstrate that citizen perceptions about immigrant

(non)attachment are strong predictors of support for restrictive measures, using a highly relevant Arizona law as the basis of my analysis.

Immigrant (Non)attachment

Previous surveys have asked what might seem to be comparable questions about generalized perceptions of outsiders (e.g., nationalist leanings) to get at what determines hostile attitudes. However, the questions have been overly broad and are unable to speak to the dynamics of group acceptance that are involved in the perceptions that native-born citizens hold about immigrant newcomers. Whereas typical measures of nationalism posit feelings of superiority about one’s own nation over other nations, I argue that the actual mechanism driving hostility is a preference for maintaining exclusivity.

Arizona’s S.B. 1070

Given the lack of federal immigration reform efforts, it is useful to start to test my theoretical expectations about (non)attachment effects using the most relevant immigration policies currently offered in the United States, which are statewide measures. Few surveys currently exist that can speak to the statewide legislation that has occurred in the 2010s, however. Due to these limitations of the existing data, I gathered responses to questions that I placed on an original national survey (fielded in the summer of 2010). One of the questions from the survey asked respondents about a newly adopted

Arizona immigration law that had been discussed in the news media at the time.

92 Arizona’s SB 1070 has not only had a great impact on the discourse surrounding reform, but continues to discussed by officials and members of the news media even today.

Focusing on this law ultimately allows me to speak to the types of policies that are actually being adopted throughout the states in the 2010s.

Arizona’s S.B. 1070 was heralded as the most restrictive piece of immigration legislation in recent U.S. history. Since the 2010 Arizona legislation, other states’ legislators have been inspired by the new stipulations of the law to develop increasingly restrictive forms of legislation in their own states. This inspiration took the form of similar bills that were introduced immediately after S.B. 1070’s adoption, with Indiana,

Georgia, and South Carolina actually adopting more restrictive policies as a result of

Arizona-inspired legislative proposals. Alabama has additionally adopted legislation thought to be even more restrictive than the Arizona law. What made the Arizona bill so popular to spur this additional streak of restrictive lawmaking nationwide? Originally signed into law on April 23rd by Governor Jan Brewer, the bill was promoted as a response to government inaction to confront illegal immigration-related problems. While the law listed various new provisions that would alter many of the state’s immigration procedures, the most noteworthy stipulation was one that enabled law enforcement officials to ask perpetrators of legal infractions (i.e., traffic violations) to present proof of their legal residence if the official suspected the offenders to be residing in the country illegally. As the bill gave the legal official discretion about who would be required to present proof of residence, many opponents were vocal in their criticism that the law promoted racial profiling. Furthermore, opponents claimed that the law was a hastily forced attempt by lawmakers to fold to emerging private prison industry pressures. There

93 was some evidence that interest groups working for the private prison industry actually authored the legislative proposal that became SB 1070 (See NPR 2010). Despite the vocal opposition to the law, however, there was widespread support for the measure throughout the state of Arizona and nationwide. Additionally, the Arizona law made an impact on other states’ legislative agendas because the polls showed widespread support for what was seen as an attempt to deal with the illegal immigration problem. Currently, the law continues to be brought back into the public discourse due to the 2012 election, seen recently with the Republican primary debates having highlighted the Arizona strategy to probe the candidates’ stances on immigration reform (e.g., South Carolina primary debate).

The Arizona law therefore was an ideal state policy from which to gauge the public’s current reaction toward immigration policy and its handling of illegal immigrants. First, it accurately portrayed the trajectory of statewide immigration reform, which is restrictive and typically attempts to “correct” illegal immigration. In examining the Arizona law, I was therefore able to improve upon past analyses focusing on opinion about failed statewide propositions or general immigration levels. These studies have not been able to offer analyses that speak to the public opinion on policies that are relevant to the discourse. Second, the Arizona law was entrenched with a discussion about racial profiling, as well as this discussion taking place during an economic downturn in both the state of Arizona and throughout the nation more broadly, which should suggest large effects accruing from racial and economic factors. The fact that I draw from an issue where alternative factors should be predominating therefore has the benefit of providing the most stringent test possible of my theoretical expectations of threatened American

94 identity. Third, and most generally, the law allows for a valid measure of hostile immigration opinion to be constructed, as it was heralded as the most restrictive piece of legislation in recent history. Being able to explain attitudes toward this legislation therefore makes it possible to then explain what are the current and most salient drivers of hostile immigration opinion in America. To reiterate, I focus on this important state law to ask why Americans are willing to express hostile immigration attitudes, particularly ones that put pressure on migrants who lack legal status to return home.

Hypotheses

To examine the relationship between threatened identity and hostile policy preferences, this chapter will test the second hypothesis of this dissertation. My general expectations are that immigration opinion is driven by the threat of national identity devaluation. I previously demonstrated that this threat manifests itself when individuals draw on strong personal attachment to the nation to express hostile immigration attitudes.

In Chapter Three, people who were high in personal attachment were shown to be more likely to voice restrictive immigration attitudes. I now turn to testing the effects of the second condition for threatened identity to be triggered, which is a perceived lack of attachment on the part of immigrants. I expect citizens who perceive immigrants as not being attached to the American group will be more likely to express support for restrictive immigration policies. I therefore posit the second hypothesis of this dissertation.

“Immigrant (Non)attachment Threat Hypothesis”: There will be a positive relationship between perceptions that immigrants are unattached to American identity and support for

95 the Arizona law, ceteris paribus. This process occurs because citizens view illegal immigrants as particularly (non)attached, since they are seen as neglecting to go through legal channels to reside in the U.S. I contend that citizens who believe immigrants do not value or “do not want to have” an American identity will express more support than those who believe immigrants do value American identity.

The Data

In order to test my claims of immigrant (non)attachment effects on hostile immigration attitudes, I made use of an original national survey that was fielded through

YouGov Polimetrix in August of 2010 (N=400). YouGov Polimetrix is an Internet polling firm, which has been used by the scholarly community as well as private entities.

Polimetrix is useful because it fields a sample of over one million respondents, of which I received a cross section of four hundred. In terms of their sampling technique, scholars have supported the use of their method of ‘matched sampling’ to arrive at samples that are more representative of the demographic breakdown of the American public (Rivers

2007). Their method has been shown to outperform random digit dialing survey samples

(RDD), in addition to weighted sampling techniques. From more of an observational standpoint, this polling house has the benefit of having a more realistic sample particularly in terms of its respondent educational levels. One of the problems associated with Internet polling is that respondents typically have higher levels of education due to their probability sampling methods. Their educational levels are consistently higher than most Americans, whereas the Polimetrix matching technique avoids these types of problems. I therefore consider the YGP data to be able to test the empirical expectations

96 put forth in this dissertation because they allow for me to speak to public opinion on immigration policy better than most phone interviews, while there is some evidence that they have benefits that other Internet polling houses lack (See Krosnick 2011 for a counterargument). The summary statistics provide additional evidence that the sample roughly approximates the American public. As can be seen in Table 4.1, the YGP survey respondents are roughly synonymous with the demographic backgrounds of the American public more generally.

The timing of the survey data collection was apt, as public awareness of the controversy surrounding Arizona’s SB 1070 had peaked. In particular, public familiarity with the law was likely to be high first due to the collection of the data having been in the summer following its passage. Most importantly, media coverage was augmented by a proposed federal injunction of the bill occurring at the same time that the data collection took place. The injunction was ultimately lifted, and the law is now in place in the state of Arizona.

97

2010 YGP 2010 Census

Racial Background White 73.0% 63.7% Black 11.0% 12.6% Hispanic 9.8% 16.3% Other 6.2% 7.4% Gender Male 46.0% 49.2% Female 54.0% 50.8% Education No high school 4.0% 13.0% HS Grad 40.6% 28.4% Some College 22.9% 29.3% College Degree 32.5% 29.3% Age Group 18-44 39.8% 48.0% 45-64 45.8% 35.0% 65+ 14.4% 17.0% Total N 400 Comparison of respondent characteristics of the original 2010 YouGov Polimetrix survey sample (2010, P.I. Paul Beck, Allyson Shortle (Co- P.I.) with the demographic background of the American public according to the 2010 Census. The YGP sample is restricted to non- Hispanic U.S. citizens. All Census Data was obtained from Census reports occurring after the collection of the 2010 Census.

TABLE 4.1. RESPONDENT CHARACTERISTICS

Dependent Variable

The dependent variable in this chapter’s analysis is a question on the YGP survey about whether the respondent approves of the Arizona law (from strongly disapprove to strongly approve). The exact wording was, “Arizona has recently been in the news for a new controversial immigration law the state has adopted. This law would allow officials

98 to request documentation of those they suspected to be in the country illegally. In general, do you approve or disapprove of the Arizona law?” From this question, I created a ‘support for SB 1070’ measure which equals four if the respondent strongly approved, three if the respondent somewhat approved, two if the respondent somewhat disapproved, and one if the respondent strongly disapproved. I excluded from the analysis those who refused to answer. Table 4.2 presents the frequencies for the YGP sample’s baseline approval of Arizona SB 1070, which demonstrates a majority of support (72%), leaving a minority of the sample that disapproved of the law (28%). These percentages suggest that citizens were hostile in their preferences at the point that public interest in SB 1070 had reached its height.

Approval N % Strongly disapprove 44 13% Somewhat disapprove 56 16% Somewhat approve 88 25% Strongly approve 167 47% Total 355 100%

TABLE 4.2. APPROVAL FOR SB 1070

Independent Variables

The main independent variables in my empirical analysis were questions about immigrant (non)attachment threat. The first question asked whether the respondent agreed or disagreed that two types of immigrants were either attached or unattached to the nation. The exact wording of the question was, “Do you agree that the following immigrant groups generally want to be American? [illegal immigrants] [naturalized 99 citizens].” I generated two variables from this question. First, I constructed an, ‘illegal immigrant (non)attachment’ variable which equals four if the respondent strongly agreed, three if the respondent somewhat agreed, two if the respondent somewhat disagreed, and one if the respondent strongly disagreed. This was in keeping with the expectation that illegal immigrants are thought of as (non)attached, which will make citizens willing to express hostile attitudes if they have them. Next, I constructed a, ‘naturalized citizen attachment’ variable. It was coded in the reverse direction as the illegal immigrant

(non)attachment variable, to be consistent with the expectation that respondents would be unwilling to relate hostile attitudes to any negative feelings about immigrants who demonstrate their attachment (through legal residence). The variable equals four for strong agreement that naturalized citizens do want to be American, three if the respondent somewhat agreed, two if she somewhat disagreed, and one if she strongly disagreed that naturalized citizens did not want to be American. In Tables 4.3 and 4.4, respondents from the YGP sample held divergent beliefs about immigrants they perceived ‘do’ and

‘do not want’ to be American. Roughly two-thirds of the sample claimed that they thought illegal immigrants did not want to be American, whereas only eight percent of respondents believed that naturalized citizens did not want to be American.30

Respondents viewed illegal status as evidence that immigrants were less committed to achieving acceptance by Americans than those immigrants who go through proper legal channels to reside in the country.

30 To further highlight this point, a question also asked whether resident aliens ‘wanted to be American’. Respondents fell in between beliefs about illegal immigrants and naturalized citizens. Overall, twenty seven percent of respondents felt that resident aliens did not want to be American. I did not include this measure as a variable, because it is unclear whether respondents understood that ‘resident alien’ entailed an immigrant who was in the nation legally. 100

Agreement that “Illegal immigrants do not want to be N % American” Strongly disagree 36 10% Somewhat disagree 85 24% Somewhat agree 92 27% Strongly agree 136 39% Total 349 100%

TABLE 4.3. RESPONDENT PERCEPTIONS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT (NON)ATTACHMENT

“Naturalized citizens want to be American” N % Strongly disagree 10 3% Somewhat disagree 19 5% Somewhat agree 118 34% Strongly agree 201 58% Total 348 100%

TABLE 4.4. RESPONDENT PERCEPTIONS OF NATURALIZED CITIZEN ATTACHMENT

The third immigrant (non)attachment question asked whether the respondent agreed or disagreed to being threatened by immigrants that are (non)attached. The exact wording of the question was, “Do you agree or disagree that immigrants that don’t have allegiance to America over their native country pose a threat to the nation?” From this question, I created an ‘threat of immigrant (non)attachment’ variable which equals four if the respondent strongly agreed, three if the respondent somewhat agreed, two if the respondent somewhat disagreed, and one if the respondent strongly disagreed. In Table

Five, it is clear that a majority of respondents agree that immigrants who are

(non)attached are threatening. The three independent variables provide an adequate representation of threats of immigrant (non)attachment. They demonstrate the 101 perceptions of immigrants’ lack of wanting to be American that makes threat more likely.

They also include self-identified threat individuals express in regards to (non)attached immigrants. In the empirical analysis, I will estimate their independent effects, and then combine them into a single index, along with other threatened American identity variables derived from personal attachment to the nation.

“Immigrants that don’t have allegiance to America over N % their native country pose a threat to the nation” Strongly disagree 33 9% Somewhat disagree 51 15% Somewhat agree 120 35% Strongly agree 142 41% Total 346 100%

TABLE 4.5. RESPONDENT PERCEPTIONS OF IMMIGRANT THREAT (DISLOYAL)

I drew on a question of personal attachment to national identity in my analysis, since personal attachment was demonstrated to be a significant predictor of immigration attitudes in Chapter Three, and provides the initial condition that makes threats to

American identity likely. The exact wording of the question was, “Would you say that the following things should be very important, somewhat important, somewhat unimportant, or very unimportant in making someone a true American? [thinking of oneself as an American] [Having American citizenship].” I made two variables, which equal four if the respondent strongly agreed, three if somewhat agreed, two if somewhat disagreed, and one if strongly disagreed with the national identity norms. I specifically used these norms to represent attachment due to their strong relevance to how Americans determine who counts as a member of the national ingroup (See Schildkraut 2007). 102 Tables 4.6 and 4.7 demonstrate large majorities of Americans who have a strong personal attachment to the nation based on adherence to these national identity norms.

“Thinking of oneself as American makes one American” N % Strongly disagree 4 1% Somewhat disagree 17 5% Somewhat agree 94 27% Strongly agree 232 67% Total 347 100%

TABLE 4.6. PERSONAL ATTACHMENT (THINKING OF ONESELF AS AMERICAN)

“Being a citizen makes one American” N % Strongly disagree 4 1% Somewhat disagree 18 5% Somewhat agree 82 23% Strongly agree 252 71% Total 347 100%

TABLE 4.7. PERSONAL ATTACHMENT (CITIZENSHIP)

The YGP survey also contained information on the race, gender, education, household income, religious identification, regional location, and political opinions of the respondents. Individuals were asked to identify their racial background. I used this question first to omit Hispanic respondents from the analysis, and also to create a dummy variable for Black respondents across my analysis. Black identification has been linked to both hostile and lenient immigration attitudes, depending upon which type of immigration policies are being discussed (See Brader 2010 for a discussion about Black

Americans and immigration policy attitudes). Labor market competition hypotheses

103 predict Black citizens to express hostile attitudes, whereas general identification as marginalized group members in society predicts more lenient immigration attitudes (Gay

2006; Scheve & Slaughter 2001; Fetzer 2007). The question pertaining to education was coded according to a 1-6 ordered scale, where one indicated a respondent had not completed high school, and six indicated a post-graduate degree. Individuals were also asked their family income along a scale of 15 income “brackets”, with intervals from

$5,000 to $30,000.

Another question included in the YGP survey asked the respondent’s religious affiliation. I recoded this question as equal to one if a respondent could be identified as an Evangelical Protestant, and zero otherwise. ‘Evangelical epicenters’ have been singled out by Pew as groups that offer particularly fierce opposition to immigration in

America (Pew Research Center 2009). Since Evangelical identification is potentially an important hostility-provoking demographic distinction, I therefore included it as a dummy variable to provide a stringent test to my theoretical claims. For similar reasons, I generated a dummy variable for residence in a border state. I included a ‘border state’ variable, as opposed to a ‘southern’ variable, because of the importance that is placed upon proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border in the immigration debate (Abrejano 2010;

Dunaway 2010). It is likely that residents of states sharing a border with Mexico are more likely to form hostile attitudes than residents of non-border states.

In terms of political variables, the YGP survey had a question on self-reported political ideology, where respondents were asked to locate themselves on a scale ranging from one for extremely conservative to seven for extremely liberal. I reverse recoded this question to create a conservatism variable. The YGP survey also had a question on self-

104 reported partisan identification that asked respondents to identify on a scale ranging from one for strong Republican, two for weak Republican, three for Independent leaning

Republican, four for true Independent, five for Independent leaning Democrat, six for weak Democrat, and seven for strong Democrat. I reverse coded this question to create a

Republican partisanship variable.

I created variables of the main alternative explanations based on questions about support for racial profiling, as well as agreement with characterizing immigrants as tax burdens. The exact wording of the question meant to gauge prejudice was, “It has been reported that some police officers stop motorists of certain racial or ethnic groups because the officers believe that these groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of crime. This practice is known as racial profiling. Do you approve or disapprove of the use of racial profiling by police?” Since many Americans have been shown to think of immigrants as Hispanic, and more specifically as Mexican, racial prejudice could be a very salient predictor of hostile immigration attitudes (See Burns &

Gimpel 2000, and Lee et al. 2000). This measure diverges from Chapter Three’s racial prejudice measure, but was thought to capture the same dimensions of minority blame and preference for status dominance apparent across other popular measures of racial prejudice (Kinder & Sanders 1996; Sidanius & Pratto 1999). Furthermore, the SB 1070 law garnered particular attention due to opponents’ claims that it would promote racial profiling. Therefore, I consider this to be the most appropriate racial prejudice variable to use in an analysis of attitudes toward this particular Arizona law. A ‘prejudice against

Blacks’ variable was omitted from the analysis due to its consistently weak findings. I also included a question on the YGP survey on whether the respondent felt that

105 immigrants were tax burdens, which asked, “How much of a negative impact would you say that immigration has upon the American taxpayers?” An ‘immigrants as fiscal burdens’ variable was generated, coded as four if the respondent felt immigration had a great deal of a negative impact, three if she felt it had somewhat of an impact, two if she felt it had very little impact, and one if she felt it had no impact on American taxpayers.

Scholars have claimed that the perception of immigrants as a tax burden plays a role in the formation of hostile attitudes (Calavita 1996; Mayda 2009). I drew on this more contextualized measure of economic competition to test my theory against an important hostility-provoking economic concern. I also used a question indicating the respondent’s unemployment status to provide a variable that speaks to the theorized impact derived from labor force competition (See Hainmueller & Hiscox 2010). Initially, a rule of law variable was included to test the potential impact of adherence to the law on support for

Arizona’s SB 1070. This variable was omitted due to inconsistently weak and insignificant findings.

Model

The analyses utilized Ordered Probit estimation with robust standard errors on the following model:

[I] S = α + β2T + β3R +β5H + β6E + β7C + ε

where, S= support for Arizona’s SB 1070; T= threats from immigrant (non)attachment;

P= personal attachment to nation (e.g. pride in being American); R= Racial prejudice; E= economic factors; and C= control variables. The models are fully inclusive, since they

106 take into account the primary hypotheses of threat, both from immigrant (non)attachment

(T) and personal attachment to the nation (P), as well as including explanatory variables for the alternative hypotheses (H & E), and finally include all immigration-related control variables (C).

Results

I analyzed individual-level support for the Arizona law, estimating the aforementioned models with the hostile preference of ‘approval of Arizona SB 1070’ as the dependent variable, omitting all respondents who described themselves as Hispanic, or non-citizens. The results of the Ordered Probit analyses are displayed in Table 4.9. I first analyzed the bivariate relationships between support for SB1070 and threatened

American identity mechanisms to assess how the independent variables related to one another as well as to the dependent variable before controlling for all factors. The results of a bivariate correlation analysis are displayed in Table 4.8.

I performed a full pair-wise correlation analysis to assess the initial bivariate relationships between all independent variables with the dependent variable, and their relation to each other. The results indicated a significant correlation between threatened

American identity variables to proceed to further multivariate testing. TAI variables, which comprised four immigrant (non)attachment threat and two personal attachment threat variables, were highly and significantly correlated to support for the restrictive

Arizona SB 1070, with significant coefficients ranging from 0.35 to 0.59 (p<0.01). The

TAI variables reflect the main factors of Threatened American Identity: personal attachment to the nation (i.e., variables are labeled ‘citizen American’ and ‘think

107 American’) and perceived immigrant (non)attachment to the nation (i.e., variables are labeled ‘illegal immigrant (non)attachment’, ‘naturalized attachment’, ‘threat(non- attachment)’, and ‘threat(disloyalty)). There was also a significant relationship between support for racial profiling and approval of the restrictive immigration law (0.43, p<0.01).

The economic parameter of agreement that immigrants were tax burdens was significantly correlated to the restrictive immigration attitude as well (0.57, p<0.01).

Altogether, the bivariate relationships indicated significant correlations with approval of the restrictive immigration law arising from all of the primary and alternative explanatory variables: threatened American identity, racial prejudice, and economic competition.

Regarding the correlation of the main independent variables to one another, those theorized under threatened American identity were highly correlated with one another

(i.e., illegal immigrant (non)attachment, naturalized attachment, threat of immigrant disloyalty, threat of immigrant (non)attachment, and adherence to norms of ‘thinking oneself American’ and to norms of citizenship). In Table 4.8, with the exception of the weak relationship between perceptions about naturalized citizen attachment and national identity norm adherence, all TAI variables were significantly correlated, ranging from coefficients of 0.13 (between illegal immigrant (non)attachment and naturalized citizen attachment) to 0.79 (between threat from unattached and threat from disloyal immigrants). Due to these high correlations, I performed an exploratory factor analysis to determine whether a combined index of threat would be appropriate. The factors significantly held together, with an alpha of 0.75. I therefore incorporated a combined index of threat into the following multivariate analysis, alongside analyses that included the factors as separate explanatory variables. A combined index was useful to begin to

108 test the third hypothesis concerning the combined effects of immigrant (non)attachment and personal threats on support for SB 1070.31 However, I will emphasize the immigrant

(non)attachment effects in this chapter, since the index provides only an initial test of the true combined effect of TAI factors upon restrictive immigration policy positions.32

The pair-wise correlations also revealed large relationships between the alternative explanations and the primary TAI variables that were included.33 In terms of the implications of these high correlations for the multivariate analysis, they suggest a potential for multicollinearity once I estimate them in the same model. Highly correlated variables will generally inflate the standard errors in a model, which is problematic to the researcher since it makes it less likely to observe significant effects that might exist had the model not included two highly correlated factors. Essentially, multicollinearity sets a higher bar for being able to observe significant effects. I therefore retain all factors in the model, as they actually provide a more stringent test of the predictors than if I removed one or more theoretically relevant variables from the analysis. Multicollinearity does not appear to affect my primary indexed variable of threat, or any of the alternative variables.

31 See Discussion of this chapter for limited ability of indices to speak to combined threat, thus making the case for the next chapter’s interactive analysis. 32 A true test of the combined effect of threatened American identity factors requires an interactive analysis. Unfortunately, the statistical power to detect an interactive effect in the YGP sample is limited, which is a common problem for surveys that lack large samples of respondents (Cohen 1977; Chin, Marcolin, & Newsted 1996). For this reason, I included an index to provide an initial test to the final interactive hypothesis, but will provide a more stringent test of this hypothesis in Chapter Five. 33 The highly significant correlations between racial profiling and threat variables, as well as between economic competition and threat variables, merit a further discussion about the potential limitations of threat measurements. This discussion is located at the end of the chapter. 109

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1. Approves ----- law

2. TAI: 0.50 ----- Illegal (non) attachment 3. TAI: -0.07 -0.13 ----- Naturalized attachment

4. TAI: 0.59 0.45 -0.14 ----- Threat (disloyal)

5. TAI: 0.59 0.41 -0.14 0.79 ----- Threat (no attachment)

6. TAI: 0.35 0.12 0.00 0.34 0.35 ----- Thinks Amer.

7. TAI: 0.43 0.30 -0.03 0.44 0.41 0.49 ----- Citizen Amer.

8. Approves 0.43 0.32 -0.12 0.36 0.35 0.14 0.16 ----- racial profiling

9. Immigrants 0.57 0.38 -0.02 0.53 0.54 0.31 0.41 0.33 -- as fiscal burden

Source: 2010 YouGov Polimetrix Survey (P.I. Paul Allen Beck, Co-P.I. Allyson Shortle). All correlations are based on a restricted sample of non-Hispanic U.S. citizens (N=350), and significant correlations are in bold. Continued on next page

TABLE 4.8. PAIR-WISE CORRELATION MATRIX

110

Table 4.8 Continued

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Unemployed 0.00 -0.02 -0.11 -0.01 -0.03 0.00 0.01 0.05 -0.03

11. Conservative 0.50 0.33 -0.09 0.47 0.46 0.22 0.36 0.30 0.44

12. Republican 0.50 0.50 -0.01 0.34 0.35 0.19 0.26 0.35 0.31

13. Income 0.07 0.07 0.06 -0.05 -0.02 0.07 0.03 0.07 0.00

14. Education -0.04 0.03 0.18 -0.21 -0.15 -0.05 -0.09 0.00 -0.12

15. Evangelical -0.08 -0.10 -0.07 0.07 0.03 0.03 -0.01 -0.06 -0.11

16. Border state -0.10 -0.07 0.02 -0.07 -0.07 0.00 -0.07 -0.02 -0.01

17. Female -0.02 -0.08 0.01 -0.03 -0.07 0.09 0.03 -0.12 -0.03

18. Black -0.25 -0.18 -0.11 -0.06 -0.14 -0.15 -0.13 -0.22 -0.05

Continued on next page

111 Table 4.8 Continued

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 10. Unemployed -----

11. Conservative -0.01 -----

12. Republican -0.05 0.59 -----

13. Income -0.10 0.10 0.19 -----

14. Education -0.06 -0.07 0.05 0.36 -----

15. Evangelical 0.11 -0.08 -0.24 -0.22 -0.26 -----

16. Border state 0.00 -0.05 0.00 0.05 0.06 -0.13 -----

17. Female 0.03 -0.11 -0.07 -0.10 -0.01 0.17 0.01 -----

18. Black 0.06 -0.03 -0.35 -0.15 -0.09 0.41 -0.09 0.05 -----

112 Parameter Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Threatened American Identity: Index ------7.89*** 4.90*** (0.56) (1.17) Immigrant (Non)attachment Disloyalty is threat 1.24*** 1.26*** ------(0.45) (0.49) (Non)attachment is threat 1.34*** 0.45 ------(0.47) (0.52) Illegal imms (non)attached 1.79*** 1.15*** ------(0.29) (0.31) Naturalized attached 0.39 0.34 ------(0.47) (0.50) Personal Attachment Thinking oneself American 1.31*** 1.06** ------(0.47) (0.49) Citizenship to be American 0.96** 0.14 (0.48) (0.51) ------Racial: Approve of profiling ----- 0.50** ----- 0.58** Economic: (0.24) (0.23) Imms as tax burdens ----- 1.81*** ----- 1.74*** (0.50) (0.49) Source: Original YouGov Polimetrix Survey (2010; P.I. Paul Beck, Allyson Shortle (Co-P.I.)). Restricted to non-Hispanics. Control variable outputs are presented on the following page.

Continued on next page

TABLE 4.9. APPROVAL OF ARIZONA SB 1070

113 Table 4.9 Continued

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Controls: Conservative ---- 1.09** ---- 1.07** (0.02) (0.45) Republican ----- 0.79** ----- 0.84*** (0.33) (0.32) Income ----- 0.51 ----- 0.48 (0.31) (0.31) Education ----- 0.36 ----- 0.31 (0.31) (0.31) Unemployed ----- 0.05 ----- 0.05 (0.23) (0.23) Evangelical ----- 0.13 ----- 0.11 (0.17) (0.17) Border state ------0.36 ------0.36 (0.21) (0.20) Female ----- 0.09 ----- 0.08 (0.15) (0.15) Black ------0.30 ------0.24 (0.23) (0.24)

Pseudo R-squared 0.25 0.33 0.25 0.33 p-value 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 N 326 316 326 316

114 Multivariate Results

In Table 4.9, I analyzed the determinants of attitudes in favor of Arizona’s SB

1070, accounting for a number of individual-level demographic and immigration-related controls. The first specification omitted all variables that were not the primary threatened

American identity explanatory variables (Model One). The TAI variables are listed in

Table 4.9 under Immigrant (Non)attachment, or under Personal Attachment. In the second model, I introduced the alternative racial and economic variables. Next, Model

Three replaced the independent threat variables with a combined index of the threat factors, omitting all other variables. Finally, Model Four presented the effect of the combined index under the supposition of all alternative variables and demographic controls.

As expected, respondents were significantly more likely to express support for a restrictive law the higher their level of perceived immigrant (non)attachment. In Model

Two, estimating the threatened American identity variables independently of one another yielded highly significant effects. The results demonstrated that holding beliefs that illegal immigrants do not want to be American and being threatened by immigrants who do not have their primary allegiance to the United States led citizens to be highly likely to support the restrictive Arizona law. The personal attachment variables’ independent effects held under large constraints posed by the inclusion of alternative and control variables. They were also shown to outperform the racial profiling measure in Model

Two, and later when estimated as part of a combined index in Model Four. The coefficients for (non)attachment variables in Model Two were roughly twice the size as the racial profiling measure, increasing to nine times the size of the profiling measure

115 once they were modeled as part of the combined index. Additionally, the analysis in

Model Two confirmed further that individuals high in personal attachment were more likely to express approval of restrictive measures. This finding corroborates the effects shown in Chapter Three. The economic competition variable in Model Two produced a large and highly significant effect as well, although was outperformed by the combined index of in Model Four. The results of Model Two in particular suggest that respondents who perceived immigrants as tax burdens were increasingly likely to support restrictive immigration policy. I therefore cannot rule out the possibility that economic concerns play a role in leading citizens to voice hostile immigration attitudes due to its performance in Model Two, even though the combined index does outperform the economic effect in Model Four.

A main take away point from Model Two is that immigrant (non)attachment factors exert a positive and significant effect upon support for restrictive immigration measures, offering strong support for the Immigrant (Non)attachment hypothesis. The effect of perceived (non)attachment furthermore increases when considered alongside the similarly large and significant personal attachment effects in Model Four. These findings suggest that citizens are threatened that the high status of their American identity will be diminished if the immigrants who are not motivated to be ‘one of us’ are not dealt with severely (e.g., illegal immigrants). This is an important effect to observe, as it speaks to the high expectations Americans have for newcomers to gain acceptance by American citizens. When respondents form to their policy attitudes, they imagine illegal immigrants, who are perceived as not wanting to be American, which threatens respondents into expressing hostile attitudes.

116 The results of Table 4.9 likewise demonstrated support for a combined effect of threatened American identity factors of immigrant (non)attachment with personal attachment. In Model Four, a large and significant effect of the combined index provided partial evidence of a combined impact upon support for the restrictive SB 1070. The effect of the threat index dwarfed all other variable effects in the model, with a highly significant coefficient of 4.90 (p<0.01). The next largest effect was the economic variable, with a coefficient of 1.74 (p<0.01). The racial profiling variable resulted in a significant coefficient, although was much smaller and less significant (0.51, p <0.05).

These results suggest that when the factors of threat are treated as a distinct construct, they demonstrate sizeable power to explain support for a restrictive immigration policy.

The results therefore provide an initial suggestion that threatened identity factors of personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment might work together to make citizens more punitive in their immigration policy attitudes.

Considered together, the main findings of Table 4.9 were the strongest in their support for the Immigrant (Non)attachment Hypothesis. The results provided strong evidence that respondents who believed illegal immigrants are generally non-committal to America are more willing to express support for restrictive immigration policies than those who do not believe illegal immigrants are non-committal to America. The results also continued to demonstrate that high personal attachment led respondents to offer support for restrictive policy. Overall, the findings suggested that citizens become threatened because they believe the high status of their American identity is at risk of being diminished if illegal immigrants are not dealt with severely. This was shown in the new finding of the direct relationship of immigrant (non)attachment variables with

117 hostility, in addition to the continued significance of personal attachment variables. In order to offer their acceptance, in the form of support for lenient policy, individuals typically require applicants to perform various tasks to demonstrate their worthiness of being accepted by the group. In this chapter, I presented strong evidence in that citizens often expect immigrants to demonstrate their worthiness through first showing commitment through legal residence. Specifically, through demonstrating that respondents were motivated to voice support for restrictive immigration policy when they perceived illegal immigrants as not being attached to the nation. This expands upon the analysis in the previous chapter, where I was unable to make the direct connection between perceived (non)attachment and hostility.

Perception of Illegal immigrant attachment to America Very Somewhat Somewhat not Not at all attached attached Personally Very attached 45% 52% 60% 68% Somewhat 38% 46% 54% 62% Somewhat not 33% 40% 48% 56% Not at all attached 27% 34% 42% 50%

TABLE 4.10. PREDICTED PROBABILITY OF SUPPORT FOR ARIZONA’S SB1070

In Table 4.10, I examined the predicted probability that holding varying levels of threatened American identity factors led respondents to support the restrictive Arizona law. Since the results thus far have shown strong effects of both TAI factors of personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment, the logical next step is to decipher whether they work together to produce hostility. Their combined influence would bolster the 118 support to my expectation that they are both part of a distinct threatened American identity construct. This chapter has already demonstrated an initial combined effect through strong statistical effects of a combined index. Does this combined influence translate into any substantive changes in support for the law? In Table 4.10, citizens were shown to in fact move their attitudes from opposing the restrictive immigration law to supporting it with increases in actual personal attachment and perceived immigrant

(non)attachment to the nation. At their least threatened, respondents who believed that illegal immigrants were generally very attached to the nation and who were also personally ‘not at all attached’ to the nation were only 27% likely to voice support for the restrictive law. At their most threatened, respondents believing illegal immigrants were

‘not at all attached’ to the nation while claiming to be very personally attached to the nation were almost three times as likely to voice support for the law. Specifically, these highly threatened individuals demonstrated a 68% likelihood of supporting the law. This finding suggests that holding both attachments makes citizens very likely to voice hostility while lacking both threats makes citizens very unlikely to do so. The results from Table 4.10 further demonstrated that respondents incrementally become more likely to voice hostility the higher they were in both factors of threat, with either factor on its own being shown to be unrelated to higher likelihoods of expressing support.

Respondents who fell under only one category of threat were roughly just as likely to voice support as to voice opposition. The findings suggest that being high in both factors of threat are necessary to make hostility likely. This finding therefore provides further support for my contention that personal attachment to the nation and perceived

119 (non)attachment on the part of immigrants work together to make citizens more willing to express hostile attitudes.

Discussion

Overall, the results of this chapter illustrate that the perceptions about outsiders, and the threats that they elicit, matter to the expression of hostile immigration attitudes. I find that respondents from a national survey are likely to believe that illegal immigrants do not in fact want to be American, which leads them to express support for the restrictive

Arizona SB 1070. These findings are indicative of the threats of identity devaluation that occur in response to immigrants who are thought not to recognize the value of American identity (e.g., illegal immigrants). Furthermore, the impact of threatened American identity on support for the Arizona law was upheld when tested against competing theories of racial prejudice and economic competition. This chapter also provides evidence that the two factors hypothesized to comprise threatened American identity, personal attachment and perceived immigrant (non)attachment, both make citizens more likely to express hostility. The results allow me to therefore confirm the Immigrant

(Non)Attchment Hypothesis, while adding further support to the Personal Attachment

Hypothesis derived from my theory of Threatened American Identity. Finally, they indicate initial support for the final Interactive Hypothesis.

This chapter’s analysis has importantly demonstrated the need to examine further how constructs of national identity attachments can include perceptions of outsiders in tandem with personal attachments citizens hold to their American identities. However, this chapter’s ability to speak to the combined effect of threat factors upon hostility had

120 some limitations, particularly in its statistical power to speak to the effect of combined

Threatened American Identity factors. The following chapter will therefore attempt to test the proposition that these factors interact with one another to produce hostile policy attitudes.

121

Chapter 5: Explaining the Interactive Effect of Threatened American Identity Factors on Deportation Policy Preferences

The previous analyses have shown that the public currently supports restrictive immigration policies and legislation that are geared toward punishing illegal immigrants, with the evidence thus far suggesting that threats to American identity are responsible for this hostility. However, do these threats work in concert with one another to provoke hostility toward illegal immigrants, as the theory proposes? Altogether, the results so far have thus suggested strong statistical effects of the effect of threatened American identity factors or personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment, independent of racial and economic effects. The analyses in Chapter Five continue to examine threatened

American identity factors by testing the final hypothesized interactive effect of threatened national identity factors. In doing so, I will turn to the topic of national reform efforts. Specifically, I look at support for the adoption of a uniform deportation policy, as deportation is currently the most widely used procedure for dealing with immigration.

Deportation policy, or asylum policy, is an important area to examine within federal

122 immigration reform, as adopting such restrictive measures would have implications for federal and statewide enforcement procedures and deportation rates.34

Hypotheses

“Interactive hypothesis”: I expect that the effect of immigrant (non)attachment threat upon support for deportation will be conditional upon higher levels of personal attachment threat: an increase in threat will lead to support when personal attachment threat is high, ceteris paribus.

The Data

In order to test the claims of threatened American identity upon deportation preferences, the empirical analyses of this chapter make use of an original, nationally representative survey fielded in the fall of 2010, which was collected through Knowledge

Networks.35 Knowledge Networks is an Internet polling firm that has been used by scholars throughout various academic disciplines and professional organizations. The usefulness of this particular survey firm is that it fields a probability sample of over one million respondents, of which I utilized a representative cross section of 1273 residents of the U.S..36 The consensus surrounding Internet polling houses is that probability samples

34 See the White House release, “Immigration Update: Maximizing Public Safety and Better Focusing Resources” for an example of the Obama administration’s strategy of deportation: http://m.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/18/immigration-update-maximizing-public-safety-and-better- focusing-resources 35 A pilot survey conducted through YouGovPolimetrix, as well as a primary study conducted through Knowledge Networks were made possible by grants that were provided by the Mershon Center for International Security at the Ohio State University, which were used to conduct a small survey in the summer of 2010 (P.O. Paul Allen Beck, The Ohio State University), as well as a larger nationally representative survey in the fall of 2010 (P.O. Irfan Nooruddin, The Ohio State University). The results from the primary survey are presented in this chapter. 36 Much of the concern with coverage error and sampling biases have been eliminated due to the standards that Knowledge Networks employs in its survey practices. More information regarding the polling firm’s standards and procedures can be found online at http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp/index.html. 123 are some of the most credible sources of polling data (Krosnick et al. 2010). The KN data are therefore best suited to test the main empirical expectations of this dissertation because they allow for an enhanced ability over other types of survey data to draw parallels to the opinion formation of the broader American citizenry. The demographic breakdown of the sample is comparable to the most current Census data, as Table 5.1 demonstrates.37

2010 KN 2010 Census

Racial Background White 79.8% 67.3% Black 8.0% 12.6% Hispanic 8.0% 16.3% Other 4.2% 3.8% Gender Male 45.2% 49.2% Female 54.8% 50.8% Education No high school 9.2% 13.0% HS Grad 28.7% 28.4% Some College 29.3% 29.3% College Degree 32.9% 29.3% Age Group 18-44 40.75% 48.0% 45-64 45.25% 35.0% 65+ 14.0% 17.0% Total N 400

TABLE 5.1. RESPONDENT CHARACTERISTICS (COMPARED TO 2010 CENSUS)

Additionally, see Krosnick et al.’s 2010 Public Opinion Quarterly report for a study that concludes probability samples such as those provided by Knowledge Networks to be superior to non-probability samples. 37 A full exposition of the summary statistics from the KN data is available in the Appendix. 124

Dependent variable

The dependent variable in this chapter’s empirical analysis is a question about agreement with a federal policy of deporting illegal immigrants. The exact wording was,

“Would you say that you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the following immigration measure: detainment & deportation of illegal immigrants?” Similarly to past measures, respondents who strongly disagreed were coded as one, somewhat disagreed two, somewhat agreed three, and strongly agreed were coded as four. I utilized this measure to be consistent with a recent emphasis on illegal immigration within the political science scholarship, and also to speak to an important shift in federal procedures that have been increasingly illegally minded. This illegal- targeted procedural trend translated into nearly 400,000 deportations in 2010 alone. It is important to understand how citizens form attitudes toward these types of procedures, as they are likely to shape the reform discussion given the current political climate. 38 This chapter therefore draws on the public’s attitudes toward deportation to determine if people favor this punitive reform, and ultimately explains the factors that drive citizens to hold hostile attitudes toward relevant measures involved in the immigration debate. In

Table 5.2, there is a large majority of support in the KN sample (84%), leaving only a small minority of respondents (16%) who claimed to disagree with the practice of deporting undocumented immigrants. These percentages suggest that citizens were generally hostile in their deportation preferences.

38 The implications of these federal procedures to the study of political behavior are large, as the current deportation obsession does not seem to be likely to change any time soon. The strategy has in fact evolved to one that attempts to target the most dangerous illegal immigrants. See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/us/politics/deportation-program-draws-more- criticism.html?_r=1&ref=us for a discussion of the controversy over this policy’s implementation. 125 Deport N % Strongly disagree 68 6% Somewhat disagree 118 10% Somewhat agree 295 26% Strongly agree 656 58% Total 1137 100% Source: Original Knowledge Networks Survey (2010). Sample is restricted to non-Hispanic U.S. citizens.

TABLE 5.2: AGREEMENT WITH DEPORTATION POLICY

Independent variables

The first primary independent variable was a question about threat from immigrant (non)attachment. The exact wording of the question used was, “Some people argue that immigrants who do not want to be American pose a threat to the nation. Do you agree or disagree?” The variable was coded identically to the majority of variables in this analysis, ranging from strong disagreement which equaled one to strong agreement which equaled four. The variable performed identically to other (non)attachment variables, offering an accurate portrayal of how the KN respondents drew on perceptions of immigrant (non)attachment to express support for deportation. In Table 5.3, the data indicate that the vast majority of respondents felt threatened by immigrants that did not want to be American (70%; N=805), with only a small minority claiming they were not threatening (30%; N=336). The argument against using this threat-based measure would be that Americans should in fact believe illegal immigrants want to be American, given the breadth of evidence concerning illegal immigrants’ determination to stay in the

United States despite various hardships. However, the majority of respondents from the previous YGP sample believed the opposite, with 72% of respondents believing illegal immigrants did not want to be American. Similarly, the majority of the KN sample also 126 believed that illegal immigrants did not want to be American. The consistent finding across the two surveys provides a strong confirmation of the claims made by my theory, mainly that Americans believe that illegal immigrants do not want to be American.

Citizens therefore link illegal status to non-commitment to the nation, which suggests that threats to national identity are what drive hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants.

“Immigrants who do not want to be American pose a threat N % to America” Strongly disagree 77 7% Somewhat disagree 259 23% Somewhat agree 439 38% Strongly agree 366 32% Total 1141 100% Source: Knowledge Networks Survey (P.I. Irfan Nooruddin, 2010). The sample is restricted to non- Hispanic U.S. citizens.

TABLE 5.3: THREAT FROM IMMIGRANT (NON)ATTACHMENT

The second independent variable was a question about personal attachment to the nation. The exact wording of the question to tap centrality of American identity was, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is being American was to you?” The variable was coded from 1 when respondents answered 1 for not important at all, to ten when respondents answered 10 for the highest level of importance. In Table 5.4, well over a majority of respondents identify as being the top level of pride (61%; N=701).

Furthermore, 90% of the sample falls within the top range of personal attachment, from

7-10. The data therefore suggest the sample is largely committed to identifying as

Americans.

127 “How important is being N % American to R on a scale of one to ten?” 1 9 <1% 2 5 <1% 3 5 <1% 4 7 <1% 5 41 4% 6 42 4% 7 72 6% 8 117 10% 9 142 12% 10 701 61% Total 1141 100% Source: Original Knowledge Networks Survey (2010). Sample is restricted to non-Hispanic U.S. citizens.

TABLE 5.4: PERSONAL ATTACHMENT TO NATION

As in the previous analyses, the theoretical argument for personal attachment is that it is a foundational component of threat that occurs concurrently with immigrant

(non)attachment. Theiss-Morse argues that in order to satisfy threats to identity that cause

Americans to limit who benefits from “pro-group behavior” (i.e. such as favorable treatment granted in a policy), a level of commitment to national identity must also be true (Theiss-Morse 2009). In order for a person’s American identity to be threatened, an attachment to national identity must be present to threaten. The theoretical reason for interacting the two primary independent variables is because they should work in tandem with one another to produce the highest likelihood of provoking hostile policy attitudes when illegal immigrants are implicated.

The remaining explanatory variables mirror those used in the previous chapters.

The variables included for the alternative racial and economic explanations included measures for prejudice toward Hispanic and prejudice toward Blacks, as well as measures

128 for economic competition. Partisanship and ideology were included as political control variables, in addition to standard demographic variables of income, education, black identification, female identification, Evangelical religious identification, and residence in a border state. All explanatory variables in the models were indexed to a scale of one for ease of exposition. Similarly to previous chapters, a ‘rule of law’ variable was omitted from all analyses due to its consistent insignificant results.

Model

The model estimation serves as a first step toward understanding how we might begin to answer this question through a threatened American identity framework. The analyses utilized Ordered Probit and Ordinary Least Squares(OLS) to estimate the following models:

[I] D = α + β2T + β3P +β5H + β6E + β7C + ε

[II] D = α + β2T + β3P + β4TP +β5H + β6E + β7C + ε,

where, D= support for federal policy of deportation; T= threat from immigrant

(non)attachment; P= personal attachment to nation (e.g. pride in being American); H=

Hispanic animus and related racial factors; E= economic factors; and C= control variables. The models are fully inclusive, since they take into account the primary hypotheses of threat, both from immigrant (non)attachment (T) and personal attachment to the nation (P), as well as including explanatory variables for the alternative hypotheses

(H & E), and finally include all immigration-related control variables (C).

129

Results

I analyzed individual-level support for deportation, omitting all respondents who described themselves as Hispanic, or non-citizens. The results of the OLS analyses are displayed in Table 5.6. I first analyzed the bivariate relationships between support for deportation and threatened American identity mechanisms to assess how the independent variables related to one another as well as to the dependent variable. The results of a full pair-wise correlation analysis are displayed in Table 5.5. The correlation analysis demonstrated a substantial overlap between deportation attitudes and the threatened

American identity variables of immigrant (non)attachment and personal attachment.

Further, the primary variables’ correlation to deportation attitudes was stronger than competing explanatory variables of racial prejudice and economic competition. The strongest correlation to the hostile deportation preference was demonstrated by the interaction of immigrant (non)attachment and personal attachment. In regards to their correlation to the alternative variables, racial and economic variables did correlate significantly with the immigrant (non)attachment variable in particular. The correlation was not strong enough to suspect that the immigrant (non)attachment variable was acting as a proxy for either variable, with coefficients of 0.23 and 0.28. These correlations were generally weaker than the correlation between immigrant (non)attachment and personal attachment, however (coefficient of 0.29).

There were stronger correlations between the main variables and conservative ideology and Republican partisanship, however. The relationship of conservative ideology with immigrant (non)attachment and personal attachment resulted in correlation

130 coefficients of 0.32 and 0.35. This was in addition to its correlation with the economic competition variable (0.34). These correlations are not large enough to suggest that conservative ideological leanings are driving personal attachment and immigrant

(non)attachment perceptions. However, they are important considerations for further investigation within the multivariate analyses. If the addition of the conservative ideology variable diminishes the effect of TAI factors, it could be indicative of an overlapping relationship. The conservative and Republican variables are also significantly correlated to the main variables in Table 5.5. To reiterate my point from

Chapter Three, the immigration issue is constantly evolving to define a greater ability for partisan stances to be developed quickly. In particular, it is my impression that

Republicans and conservatives have developed consistently restrictive stances on immigration over the past decade. I will therefore pay attention to these control variables in the forthcoming multivariate analysis to see whether my analysis supports my impression that conservative ideology and Republican partisanshp will yield positive effects upon support for restrictive immigration policies. Overall, the results from the pairwise correlation analysis in Table 5.5 indicate a need for further testing of the TAI variable effects on support for deporting illegal immigrants, controlling for these important alternative factors. They suggest a need to pay attention to the alternative variables of racial prejudice and economic competition, and also the conservative ideology control variable.

131

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1. Deport -----

2. Interaction 0.39 -----

3. Imm (Not)att. 0.36 0.70 -----

4. Personal att. 0.25 0.70 0.29 -----

5. Racial 0.09 0.16 0.23 -0.03 -----

6. Economic 0.20 0.25 0.28 0.10 0.13 -----

7. Conservative 0.25 0.38 0.32 0.35 0.16 0.33 -----

8. Republican 0.25 0.29 0.28 0.19 0.03 0.34 0.63 -----

9. Evangelical 0.07 0.11 0.12 0.12 -0.05 0.09 0.18 0.09 -----

10. Border state 0.00 0.00 -0.01 0.00 -0.06 -0.05 -0.05 -0.02 0.01

11. Income 0.01 -0.12 -0.15 -0.02 0.02 -0.11 0.03 0.11 -0.14

12. Education -0.09 -0.20 -0.21 -0.12 -0.14 -0.16 -0.08 0.01 -0.19

13. Female -0.03 -0.01 -0.04 0.05 -0.15 0.01 -0.07 -0.07 -0.02

14. Black -0.12 -0.05 -0.05 -0.04 -0.12 -0.12 -0.08 -0.27 -0.29

Table 5.4 continued on next page

TABLE 5.5. PAIR-WISE CORRELATION MATRIX (2010 KN SURVEY)

132 TABLE 5.5, CONTINUED 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 10. Border state -----

11. Income -0.04 -----

12. Education 0.05 0.41 -----

13. Female -0.04 -0.03 -0.05 -----

14. Black 0.01 -0.16 -0.13 0.02 -----

In Table 5.6, I analyzed the determinants of attitudes in favor of deportation, accounting for a number of individual-level demographic and immigration-related controls. The first specification omitted all variables that were not the independent threatened American identity explanatory variables (Model One). I did this to offer a basic model for comparison, to determine whether the inclusion of additional variables would alter the significance or magnitude of the main variables. I expand upon the basic model in the second model, by introducing the interaction of the two primary variables.

Further, I expand upon the basic model in the third model by including the alternative racial and economic variables without an interaction. I present an identical specification to the third model in Model Four, adding the interaction variable. The fifth model then expands upon the third by offering a fully estimated model absent the interaction, while the sixth model expands upon the fourth model by representing a fully estimated model that includes the interaction variable. It was useful to present the models in this way to compare interactive and non-interactive models; all non-interactive analyses are presented in the odd numbered models and the interactive analyses in the even numbered

133 models. For ease of exposition, I used OLS with robust standard errors to estimate all models. Model replications using Ordered Probit with robust standard errors are presented in the Appendix.

Across all non-interactive models (One, Three, & Five, respondents were significantly more likely to express support for a restrictive policy the higher their level of both immigrant (non)attachment threat and personal attachment. The results demonstrated a largely positive and significant effects from perceived threat from ‘non- committal’ immigrants (e.g., (non)attached immigrants) as well as personal attachment, which held under large constraints posed by the inclusion of alternative and control variables. The main variables of Threatened American Identity additionally were shown to outperform the racial and economic competition variables. The coefficients for

(non)attachment and personal attachment in the fully estimated non-interactive Model

Five were roughly three to four times the size as both alternative variables. The immigrant (non)attachment variable yielded the largest and most significant effect of the model, with a coefficient of 0.92 (p<0.01), and the personal attachment variable resulted in a positive an highly significant coefficient of 0.72 (p<0.01). In contrast, the racial profiling variable resulted in a significant yet much smaller positive coefficient of 0.24

(p<0.01), while the economic competition variable producing a less significant, yet equally small coefficient of 0.25 (p<0.05). The inclusion of the conservative ideology variable, and all other control variables, did not diminish the size or significance of the main variable effects. This is important to note, as there was an initially high correlation between conservatism and the main TAI variables. Since the explanatory power of the main variables and conservatism variable are maintained when included jointly in a

134 model, this suggests both variables to have strong independent effects upon support for deportation. This diminishes any concern about conservatism driving any effects arising from threats to American identity. Overall, the findings from the non-interactive models corroborate the findings of the previous empirical chapters, providing strong evidence in support of the independent effects posited by the immigrant (non)attachment and personal attachment hypotheses. The findings suggest that belief that American identity is an important identity, and also the expectations that immigrants are attached to American identity, makes individuals more willing to offer hostile policy attitudes. This finding offers strong evidence to confirm the personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment hypotheses. Individuals are likely to offer hostile attitudes toward illegal immigrants due to their strong personal attachments to national identity, and are more likely to draw on these attachments than to draw on the predispositions of racial prejudice or economic beliefs. What about the potential combined effect of these factors on individual willingness to express hostility?

135

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Threatened American Identity

Interaction ---- 0.85*** ---- 0.71*** ---- 0.70*** (0.18) (0.18) (0.21)

(Non)Attachment 1.21*** 0.68*** 1.09*** 0.55*** 0.92*** 0.50*** (0.11) (0.16) (0.18) (0.16) (0.13) (0.16) Personal attachment 0.88*** 0.25 0.83*** 0.33 0.72*** 0.22 (0.15) (0.20) (0.22) (0.22) (0.16) (0.23)

Racial profiling ------0.28*** 0.25*** 0.24*** 0.21*** (0.15) (0.06) (0.08) (0.07)

Economic competition ------0.36*** 0.32*** 0.25** 0.20 (0.11) (0.10) (0.11) (0.11)

Conservative ------0.26 0.23 (0.16) (0.16) Republican ------0.17 0.15 (0.11) (0.11) Evangelical ------0.04 -0.04 (0.06) (0.06) Border state ------0.05 -0.05 (0.05) (0.05)

Continued on next page

TABLE 5.6: SUPPORT FOR DEPORTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, OLS ESTIMATION

136 Table 5.6 Continued

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Income ------0.26 0.23 (0.16) (0.16) Education ------0.17 0.15 (0.11) (0.11) Female ------0.04 -0.04 (0.06) (0.06) Black ------0.05 -0.05 (0.05) (0.05)

R-squared 0.15 0.16 0.15 0.16 0.17 0.18 p-value 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 N 1131 1122 1108 1101 1099 1092

To assess the combined effect of Threatened American Identity factors, I first computed the predicted probabilities of support for deportation when both threat factors are present within an individual. In Figure 5.1, I present the predicted probability that a typical respondent will support deportation when moving from low to high levels of immigrant (non)attachment and personal attachment. I held each alternative and control variable at its mean or modal value to assess the probability of an individual voicing support across low to high levels of threat. The results demonstrated that an individual with low threats, in the form of personal attachment and perceived threat from unattached immigrants, did not have a strong likelihood of voicing support for deportation (just over a fifty percent likelihood). However, as a respondent was shown to develop a single threat, either from personal attachment or from immigrant (non)attachment, this likelihood rose to a 69-74% probability of voicing a hostile preference. By the time both

137 factors of threat were present, an individual respondent had a fully 85% chance of voicing a hostile deportation attitude. These predicted probabilities provide strong evidence that as threat factors gradually become present, individuals are likely to express hostile deportation attitudes, with the most likelihood occurring when both are present.

While this finding establishes a substantive effect of combined threat factors, the interactive models can provide more information about the statistical significance of their combined effect. The main question this chapter confronts is whether the effect of threat from immigrant (non)attachment is truly conditional upon personal attachment, as the theory suggests. I therefore turn to the interactive models in Table 5.6 (Models Two,

Four, & Six) to provide a rigorous statistical test of their conditional effect.

As expected, the strongest statistical findings emerged from the effect of the interaction across all interactive models. This variable outperformed all alternatively theorized effects, and was consistent across all model specifications. In Model Six, under the full supposition of alternative and control variables, the interaction resulted in a large and highly significant coefficient of 0.71 (p<0.01). The predicted probabilities provided evidence that holding multiple independent threats increased the likelihood of expressing hostility. However, they could not speak to whether the TAI factors were dependent upon one another to cause an individual to express hostility. In other words, they could not test whether there was a conditional effect. The significant interaction term in

Models Four and Six provides evidence of a conditional effect of TAI factors of personal attachment and immigrant (non)attachment. This means that it is not merely the case that both factors are working independently within an individual to make him or her more likely to express a hostile immigration attitude. Rather, an individual’s likelihood of

138 expressing hostility is made more likely due to immigrant (non)attachment threat, if that individual is high in personal attachment.39

The racial profiling effect was significant, although with a much smaller coefficient of 0.21 (p<0.01). The economic competition variable did not fare well either, failing to produce a significant coefficient in the fully estimated interactive model

(coefficient of 0.20, p<0.10). In terms of the constitutive terms of the interaction, immigrant (non)attachment successfully retained its significance once the interaction was included. The other constitutive term did not, however, with personal attachment demonstrated to lose its significant coefficient seen in the previous fully estimated non- interactive model. These results suggest that once the interaction is included, only immigrant (non)attachment can explain hostility above what is explained by the interactive term. I will later assess whether this loss of significance denotes insignificance of the full interactive effect. Without the analysis of the full effect of the interaction, these initial interactive findings suggest that the ability of immigrant

(non)attachment threat to impact support for deportation is in fact conditional upon high personal attachment to the nation. Along with the previous indication from the predicted probabilities, this additional finding offers a strong piece of preliminary evidence in support of the final interactive hypothesis of this dissertation. In order to add robustness to the analysis of the interaction’s term’s significance, I will conduct a graphical analysis to examine the full effect of the interaction term from Model Six.

Due to the complex statistical nature of interaction terms, an additional interactive examination can provide a statistically rigorous analysis. As Brambor et al. (2005) note,

39 An interpretation of a significant interactive effect as a conditional effect is consistent with most scholarly interpretations of interactive effects in political science (Gill 2001). 139 “The analyst cannot even infer whether X has a meaningful conditional effect on Y from the magnitude and significance of the coefficient on the interaction term”. The coefficient of an interaction term is actually a haphazard indicator of significance of an interactive effect, because it is possible that such an observed effect is being driven by a small portion of the data, making it a fabrication of the data as opposed to an actual effect. For example, the effect of immigrant (non)attachment threat on hostility could be influenced across certain values of personal attachment threat as to make it appear to have a significant effect across the full range of data, when one actually only exists across a couple of key points within the data. In order to ensure a coefficient is therefore truly revealing a significant effect across the full range of personal attachment, I continue to examine the substance and statistical significance of the interactive effect across the full range of personal attachment. I do so through a graphical analysis of the interaction term.

140

Source: Original Knowledge Networks Survey (P.I. Irfan Nooruddin, 2010).

Note: Sample restricted to non-Hispanic U.S. citizens. Columns represent the probability of a typical survey respondent supporting a policy of deportation as R moves from low levels of personal attachment to the nation to high levels of attachment, in addition to moving from low to high levels of perceived immigrant (non)attachment. Probabilities were constructed by keeping all control variables at their mean or modal values.

FIGURE 5.1. MARGINAL EFFECTS OF CONTSITUTIVE TERMS

In Figure 5.2, I plot the two way interaction, which represents the relationship between the dependent variable of ‘support for deportation’ and the independent variable of immigrant (non)attachment (e.g., ‘threat’), moderated by the independent variable of personal attachment. Figure 5.2 uses the term “threat” to refer to immigrant

(non)attachment threat for ease of exposition. The plot of the interaction is derived from the results in Model Six of Table 5.6. The divergent effects of the interaction are determined by utilizing the estimated interactive model’s coefficients, means, and upper and lower bounds of the constitutive terms, in addition to taking into account the variance 141 and covariance of the terms, with overall confidence at 95%. The specific graphing methods utilized were taken from Dawson, who borrows from Aikin and West (1991) and Dawson & Richter (2006).

FIGURE 5.2. INTERACTION OF THREAT FACTORS (P VALUE=0.00)

In Figure 5.2, the dotted line represents citizens that possess high levels of personal attachment, and the solid line represents individuals who are relatively less attached to being American. The main take away point from the figure is that respondents who are high in personal attachment are more likely to be affected by

142 immigrant (non)attachment ‘threat’ than are respondents who are low in attachment. As the dotted ‘high personal attachment’ line moves from low to high immigrant

(non)attachment, it traverses the midpoint, which indicates an attitude change in the hostile direction. This means that when immigrant (non)attachment is low, the high personal attachment group somewhat opposes deportation, but when immigrant

(non)attachment threat becomes high, these attitudes switch to being expressly pro- deportation (from 2.0 to numerical value of 3.5 out of a 4-point scale). These results suggest that citizens with high levels of personal attachment, who initially oppose deportation, could become strongly supportive of deportation as the result of feeling threatened by the thought of non-committal immigrants. This attitude change does not occur for the citizens with low attachment, as the solid line fails to cross the midpoint onto the hostile pro-deportation portion of the graph. The low attachment group’s attitudes are altered to become more pro-deportation, but they stop short of adopting hostile pro-deportation attitudes. These findings suggest that an individual is willing to express a hostile deportation attitude if that individual holds both factors of threat (high personal attachment and perceived immigrant (non)attachment). These divergent results for low and high pride citizens who harbor differing levels of threat provide strong evidence that an interactive effect is occurring. Whereas the non-interactive analysis demonstrated statistically significant and independent effects from both factors of threatened American identity, it is clear from the two-way plot of the interaction that it takes the combination of threat factors to translate into support for adopting a policy that deports illegal immigrants.

143 In Figure 5.3, I present the full effect of the interaction, computed as the partial derivation of threat’s impact on deportation. I then configured the confidence intervals around the full effect at each level of personal attachment. If values fall within a range of confidence that is divided by the X-axis of the graph, this could indicate that the full effect of the interaction at that level of personal attachment might be nonexistent

(because there is still a probability that the full interaction’s effect is zero). In Figure 5.2, the graph demonstrated a significant effect of the entire interaction since the confidence intervals around each effect of immigrant (non)attachment at all values of personal attachment fell on the same side of the X-axis. I can therefore say with 95% confidence that there is in fact an interactive effect occurring across the full range of personal attachment. Additionally, Figure 5.3 demonstrated a positive slope of the interaction, confirming a positive conditional effect of personal attachment on threat’s impact on hostility. The findings from Figure 5.3 provide strong evidence of the interaction’s significant and increasingly positive relationship to hostile deportation attitudes across all levels of personal attachment, with 95% confidence. Considered together, the three interactive analyses indicate that individuals are likely to offer support for deportation due to the effects of the perceived threats that immigrants do not want to be American, which are conditional on the effect of their personal attachment to the nation being high.

Furthermore, individuals are more likely to draw on these conditional attachments than to draw on the predispositions of racial prejudice or economic beliefs. This finding is important, as it demonstrates that seemingly innocuous forms of personal attachment to the nation continue to exact an impact on hostile immigration attitudes.

144

FIGURE 5.3. CONDITIONAL EFFECT OF IMMIGRANT (NON)ATTACHMENT ON HOSTILITY, ACROSS PERSONAL ATTACHMENT

Discussion

Past research has suggested that while people may hold positive personal attachments to their nation (i.e., as opposed to holding negative attachments of nationalism), this does not translate directly into anti-immigrant attitudes (deFigureido &

Elkins 2007). However, current studies have not adequately analyzed the link between positive attachments and more negative attachments to American identity. This is a current limitation of the literature, as negative attachments that are widely understood to drive prejudicial attitudes could be closely related to positive personal attachments to

145 national identity. This dissertation has confronted this limitation by testing the conditional effects of positive and negative sides of American identity upon hostile policy attitudes. The results of this dissertation have consistently demonstrated that both actual personal attachment and perceived immigrant (non)attachment play large roles in driving hostile immigration policy attitudes. In this chapter, I demonstrated strong statistical findings that this effect in fact arises mainly from the combined effect of these factors of threat.

Drawing on original survey data, I find that individuals are willing to voice hostile policy attitudes as a result of perceived threats of immigrant (non)attachment, which occurs when personal attachment is high. First, the combined effect of threatened

American identity factors was clearly demonstrated through predicted probabilities that suggested a near-certainty that the combination of factors would result in hostile deportation attitudes. Then, interactive models showed high levels of statistical significance resulting from the inclusion of an interaction term when estimating deportation attitudes in a regression model. Finally, a graphical analysis demonstrated a highly significant effect of the interaction across the full range of the data.

The results of this chapter provide compelling evidence to support my theoretical claims that Americans express hostile policy attitudes as the result of perceived threats to the value they ascribe to their American identities. The findings suggest that respondents draw on combined threats to voice hostility, which confirms the final interactive hypothesis. I have shown in previous chapters that the thought of immigrants, which respondents equate with an image of illegal immigrants, causes individuals to draw upon their personal attachments to determine which attitude to express. The findings of this

146 chapter suggest that the first factor of personal attachment goes hand in hand with the second factor, where individuals question immigrants’ attachment to the nation. The result of these corresponding predispositions is hostility in the form of supporting restrictive policies. Demonstrating this combined effect is an important new finding that speaks to the high expectations citizens set for immigrants, as seen through both their own initial love for country and disbelief about immigrants being able to share this love for America.

147

Chapter 6: Conclusion

This dissertation sought to understand how the public arrives at its hostile immigration attitudes, particularly those that are associated with illegal immigrants. I wanted to uncover the nature of national identity mechanisms that relate to willingness to express hostile policy attitudes. First, by comprehending whether the public draws on basic personal attachment to America to affect hostile policy attitudes. Few studies have tested the effect of more widespread and publicly acceptable forms of personal attachment, attributing hostility for the most part to nationalistic attachments that implicate a smaller subset of the American public (e.g., beliefs of one’s nation being superior to all others). Second, by uncovering whether Americans believed immigrants are truly attached and committed to the nation, and whether they use these beliefs to inform hostile policy attitudes. Finally, I wanted to understand the conditional nature of these factors, which have in common that they both make perceived threats to the value of one’s American identity more likely. Few studies incorporating national identity into their analyses have attempted to test the interaction of American identity mechanisms.

And, even less research has incorporated tests of national identity mechanisms against racial or economic factors. I will summarize the main findings of this dissertation in the following sections. 148

Summary of Empirical Findings

Immigrants as Illegal

An important finding of this dissertation is that citizens imagine illegal immigrants when drawing on their personal attachment to the nation to express hostility.

This is an important finding that has not yet been captured by scholars, despite scholars having suggested this is probably the case (Mayda et al. 2009; Ramakrishnan, Neblo, &

Esterling 2010). I find two results that corroborate this relationship. First, I find that the best available predictors of hostility are able to explain a sufficient amount of variation in public attitudes, however only toward policies that implicate illegal immigrants. When individuals are forced to think about hostile policies that would affect legal immigrants, the statistical models cannot explain much of the variation at all (R-squared = 0.05).

Second, the small variation that is explained indicates that traditional predictors of hostility are in the unexpected direction, meaning that they explain leniency toward legal immigrants. The findings together suggest that individuals do not see legal immigrants as a relevant group in the discussion on immigration reform, and simply offer attitudes that are contrary to the opinions they form about illegal immigrants (using the same predictors, for the most part).

Threat from Personal Attachment

Having established the tendency of individuals to focus upon illegal immigrants in their policy attitude expression, for the remainder of the dissertation, I sought to understand how individuals react to policies that implicate illegal immigrants. While

149 there is a burgeoning scholarship of public opinion on immigration, the literature to this point has been overly broad, and has yet to effectively examine relevant policies that implicate specific groups of immigrants. Furthermore, much of the scholarship has focused on more negative conceptions of national identity, with fewer tests of the effect of general or positive personal attachment upon hostility. In Chapters Three to Five, I find strong evidence that has attachments to the nation have a highly significant and positive effect on individual hostility. In Chapter Three, respondents who highly identify as being American, through norm adherence and general levels of pride, are highly likely to want to restrict illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid & Food Stamps. In

Chapter Four, I find respondents who are high in personal attachment in the form of self- reported pride are significantly likely to support the restrictive Arizona law that would allow officials to ask violators of minor violations to demonstrate proof of residence if officials suspected they were in the country illegally. In Chapter Five, I find respondents who are high in personal attachment, this time through a measure of how important they rate being American, are highly and significantly likely to support a hypothetical policy that would deport illegal immigrants. I therefore find consistent and strong statistical evidence that personal attachment is a determinant of hostile policy attitudes, regardless of whether the policy in question is a relevant political issue that has been discussed frequently in the past, is a current state immigration measure that has sparked controversy, or is a hypothetical new federal policy reform that is likely to occur in the future. The strong and significant effect of personal attachment throughout all analyses outperformed all alternative and control variables theorized to be relevant to hostile immigration policy attitudes. The findings show that a basic belief that American

150 identity is important is related to the expression of more hostile attitudes. This is crucial in establishing that the first factor of Threatened American Identity was fulfilled. I then turned to testing the role of individual expectations about immigrant attachment to

America.

Threat from Perceived Immigrant (Non)attachment

Immigrant (non)attachment measures represent the single greatest predictors of hostility in every multivariate model where their variables were estimated. Additionally, their original measurements offer many important descriptive insights that are the first of their kind. Given that they were original measures, and they were collected across two surveys, the findings concerning both their descriptive and multivariate effects represent a major contribution of this dissertation.

In Chapter Four, I provide an in-depth analysis of a variety of (non)attachment measures, while Chapter Five draws on one of the more powerful measures to test an interactive effect with personal attachment. I find that individuals are adamant about immigrants being loyal, committed, and attached to America. However, the majority of respondents across both surveys believe that illegal immigrants do not want to be

American (over seventy percent in the first survey (N=400), and over fifty percent in the second (N=1146)). There is no evidence to suggest the alternative possibility that the public perceives illegal immigrants to be committed, loyal, or actually want to be

American. To add further context to this finding, perceptions about immigrant

(non)attachment to the nation appear to be in reference to illegal immigrants only. In

Chapter Four, I find that in contrast with respondents’ lack of faith that illegal immigrants

151 want to be American, almost all respondents feel naturalized citizens want to be

American (nearly 95%). This divergent reaction to illegal versus naturalized citizens provides initial evidence that perceptions of illegal status are intimately linked with concerns about their commitment and loyalty to the nation. The close relationship between illegality and national identity is also a take away point of Chapter Three, where national identity mechanisms are shown to significantly relate to policy attitudes about illegal but not legal immigrants.

The final descriptive findings from analyzing my original immigrant

(non)attachment measures are that most respondents claim to be threatened by immigrants who do not want to be American, and by immigrants who maintain more loyalty to their home country than to America. These final threat measures demonstrate that individuals feel the lack of commitment presents a symbolic threat to their valuable

American identities. Across both surveys, more than seventy percent of respondents claimed to be threatened by the thought of (non)attached immigrants, which is similar to general levels of agreement about immigrant (non)attachment across both surveys.

Overall, the descriptive findings of the original immigrant (non)attachment measures provide strong evidence that individuals perceive a lack of commitment and loyalty to the nation on the part of illegal immigrants. They also indicate that this perception is due to threats individuals feel non-committal immigrants pose to their American identities.

Interaction of Threats to American Identity

The final finding of this dissertation is that threat factors interact to produce hostile immigration attitudes. Previous scholarship has viewed attachments as distinct

152 constructs from one another, and most scholars have shied away from testing the impact of the relationship between national identity attachments. Some even explicitly reject the possibility that holding a basic attachment to one’s identity has an effect on individual hostility, with a subsequent implication being that they also would then reject any interactive effect (deFiguerido & Elkins 2003). I find strong evidence that personal attachment works in combination with perceived immigrant (non)attachment to drive support for deporting illegal immigrants, with further evidence suggesting their conditional effect to be highly significant and substantively meaningful. First, predicted probabilities in Chapters Four and Five demonstrate that the presence of both threat factors is associated with a nearly certain likelihood of voicing support for Arizona’s SB

1070 as well as a hypothetical federal deportation policy. Second, Chapter Five’s interactive models and graphical analyses demonstrate the significant conditional relationship of threat factors that drive hostile deportation attitudes.

Across both Chapters Four and Five, predicted probabilities provide strong evidence of the presence of both threat factors increasing the likelihood that respondents are willing to voice hostility. In Chapter Four, the probability of voicing support for the hostile Arizona SB 1070 for the least threatened, (e.g., respondents who believed that illegal immigrants were generally attached to the nation and who were also not personally attached to the nation) was only a 27% likelihood of voicing support for the restrictive law. At their most threatened, however, respondent probability increases to a 68% likelihood of supporting the hostile law. This represents a three-fold increase in the likelihood of voicing support for the law if one goes from the minimum to maximum conditions of threat. Similarly, turning to a hypothetical federal policy of deportation, the

153 presence of both threats for a given respondent also increases the likelihood of voicing support dramatically (from 54% to 85%).

Turning to the more statistically stringent interactive models, Chapter Five provided support for a strong statistical effect of the interactive variable upon support for deportation attitudes. The most compelling and final evidence was then provided by the graphical analysis of the interactive effect. Figure 5.2 demonstrated that an individual who went from low to high immigrant (non)attachment only offered hostile deportation support when one was already high in personal attachment. There was no demonstrable effect of immigrant (non)attachment on hostility when personal attachment was low for respondents. The interaction was shown to be highly significant across the full range of the data, and likewise suggested that both factors were indeed necessary to push an individual from an oppositional stance to support for deportation. In sum, perceiving threats from immigrants not being attached to America drives hostile attitudes to a large and statistically significant degree, only for those individuals who are high in personal attachment to the nation. These final findings were extremely important, offering new insights into the multifaceted nature of attachments that work to drive hostile attitudes, as well as bringing to the fore several implications for future research on immigration policy attitudes.

Implications

The findings of this dissertation further uncover a variety of implications for good policy making and democratic representation in America. In Chapter Two, I suggested that if American citizens felt immigrants harmed the prestige of identifying as an

154 American, it would lead to more policies that are restrictive toward even those immigrants Americans claim to view favorably (legal immigrants). My examination reveals that the threats to American identity are in fact impacting citizen policy attitudes.

Americans’ extreme willingness to offer hostile attitudes about illegal immigrants therefore suggests it is possible for politicians to use illegal immigrants as scapegoats to put forth the most restrictive policies possible to garner support, even those that affect legal immigrants. The public’s negative perceptions about immigrant (non)attachment therefore make the country vulnerable to ill-informed policy prescriptions and ultimate adoptions. This is because the diverse options, which in actuality include lenient propositions alongside the restrictive ones, are not being offered and analyzed.

Additionally, my research uncovers several electoral implications for candidates offering tough stances on immigration, in addition to their ability to persuade the public.

First, my results suggest that the majority of non-Hispanic Americans will be responsive to candidate stances that are ‘tough’ on illegal immigration. Therefore, candidates could gain favor through restrictive stances on policies that are associated with curbing illegal immigration. Furthermore, it could be problematic for officials to favor any lenient immigration policies. Even if officials were to try to support a seemingly innocuous policy that provides favorable treatment to legal immigrants, individuals do not seem to think of legal immigrants as a relevant group overall. Citizens tend to come back to the image of illegal immigrants no matter which type of immigrant is explicitly discussed by an immigration measure. By suggesting a policy that helps legal immigrants, officials could unintentionally start a conversation about policies of illegal immigration, toward which the public is currently hostile due to their strong attachments to American identity.

155 This means that politicians who support any types of lenient reforms will most likely shy away from the topic altogether, which limits the diverse views to which the public should be exposed. Second, my analysis suggests that opponents of illegal immigration need not even mention immigrant treatment when putting forth their immigration stances, as they can garner support for restrictive policies affecting illegal immigrants merely by using subtle cues about national identity. This could be through using rhetoric about patriotism, or perhaps even through subtle uses of symbolic images, such as the American flag. In doing so, opponents can achieve restrictive policy ends with rhetoric that is elusive and that also allows an easy escape from criticism about being anti-immigrant.

My research also has relevant implications for the current conflict candidates must confront in trying to appease the anti-immigrant non-Hispanic population, while at the same time appeasing a growing Hispanic voting bloc in America. In the 2012 election in particular, many pundits claim that the Hispanic vote is crucial in determining who wins the election (New York Times May 2012). As Hispanic citizens see immigration as a defining issue, the argument could be that the political party that puts forth more lenient stances on immigration could sway this growing bloc of voters. My research suggests that concerns about courting Hispanic voters might balance the policy stances we currently see away from completely restrictive policies, which is presumably a net positive in terms of adopting more well-reasoned and balanced immigration reforms. However, there might also be a negative implication for candidates seeking election, as they run the risk of negative electoral consequences from the non-Hispanic citizens who are in support of curbing illegal immigration at any cost. Future scholarship

156 should therefore examine whether citizens will punish candidates with more lenient immigration positions.

Limitations

While this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the relationship between personal attachments and perceived immigrant (non)attachment in hostile policy attitudes, this dissertation has shortcomings as well. Luckily, they have the benefit of being able to inform future research. First, by using original survey data, I was able to provide novel measurements of personal attachment to the nation and perceived

(non)attachment of immigrants to America. However, I was limited in my ability to speak to the many components that might define any one individual’s attachment to national identity, and most likely missed some of the variation that might exist. A major limitation of my own work, and most others incorporating national identity into their analysis, is that most Americans strongly identify as Americans, are proud to be American, and adhere to American identity norms. For any given variable, citizens are anywhere from

85 to 99% in agreement with the most patriotic sentiments presented to them. My analyses were able to offer some improvement to current measures of personal attachment, however my research suggests the need for more measures of national identity attachments to be tested in order to better understand the greater variation in personal attachments that most likely exist.

Overall, my analyses were also limited in the amount of variation I was able to explain through multivariate modeling in Chapters Three and Five. There are two explanations for why my models were unable to explain a large amount of variation in

157 hostile immigration attitudes. The first explanation is dependent variable driven, while the second explanation is independent variable driven. First, the variation in the public’s expressed hostile immigration attitudes is quite limited, which limits the ability to explain the small amount of variation that does exist. Roughly 80% or more of respondents tended to express support for restrictive policies that implicated illegal immigrants. In

Chapter Three, a vast majority of respondents expressed hostile attitudes toward providing illegal immigrants with Medicaid & food stamps. Similarly, in Chapter Five, respondents were lop-sided in their widespread enthusiasm for deporting illegal immigrants, with 84% expressing support for deportation. The limited variation explained for models with dependent variables of Medicaid & food stamp preferences and deportation preferences corresponded to smaller pseudo R-squared values for the fully estimated models (0.15 in Chapter Three and 0.16 in Chapter Five). Conversely,

Chapter Four’s dependent variable of support for the restrictive Arizona SB 1070 represented an increased variation in support, which corresponded to a doubling of the amount of variation that could be explained by the fully estimated multivariate model

(pseudo R-squared value of 0.33). Therefore, it stands to reason that the smaller amounts of variation explained in Chapters Three and Five were due to a limitation in the variation in overall immigration attitudes. In future research, I will attempt to draw on dependent variables that offer as much variation as possible.

A second possible explanation for the limited variance explained by the multivariate analyses in Chapters Three and Five is that the independent variables in the models are failing to provide enough explanatory power. While the main TAI variables explain the majority of variation in attitudes across all models in this dissertation, it is

158 apparent that the alternative explanatory variables for racial prejudice and economic competition are insufficient. Their inclusion in the models in Chapter Five in particular are unable to add any additional explanation of variation in hostile immigration attitudes.

The pseudo R-squared value remains at 0.16, despite the inclusion of racial and economic variables. This problem indicates the need for better measures of racial prejudice and economic competition.

A possible implication from the results of the interactive analysis in Chapter Five is that the combination of threats to identity might rest more heavily upon the immigrant

(non)attachment factor than personal attachment. Whereas the personal attachment measure is significant in its independent and jointly interactive association with supporting restrictive deportation policies, the interactive analysis makes clear that the threat derived from thinking illegal immigrants don’t want to be American is the necessary final threat that drives citizens to express support for the hostile policy option of deporting all undocumented immigrants. While this does not mean personal attachment to the nation is unimportant or insignificant, it is worth mentioning that low levels of personal attachment occur infrequently in the United States, and therefore citizen perceptions of immigrant (non)attachment to national identity might be shown to be sufficient predictors of hostile attitudes in future analyses of hostile immigration attitudes.

I was further limited in my measures of immigrant (non)attachment. While I focused on general perceptions of attachment, it is important to understand what goes into the perceptions of attachment. I was able to demonstrate an initial finding whereby

Americans do not see illegal immigrants as attached to the nation. However, a more

159 expansive study should be able to capture what are the components Americans see as truly demonstrating immigrants are attached to America. For example, citizens might view ability to speak English well as a sign of immigrants being attached to the nation.

Future research will need to tease out these various components to further delve into

American citizens’ expectations of immigrants.

Finally, a major limitation of my research is that I am unable to speak to a large variety of implicit drivers of national identity attachment, as my analyses focus on explaining baseline relationships between expressed opinions. I do not deny that racial prejudice and a variety of economic factors are associated with how citizens identify as

Americans. For instance, many Americans adhere to norms of ethnoculturalism, which are beliefs that true Americans should be white, northern European, Anglo-saxon

Protestants. Likewise, there are norms concerning American work ethic that converge with economic competition factors. While the empirics indicate the current relevant measures for racial and economic factors act independently of national identity variables, it is clear that more research needs to be done to determine the complex structural pathways that might exist to impact immigration attitudes. In order to do so, future avenues of research should attempt to use the best measures of racial prejudice and economic competition possible. This will entail measures that speak to concepts such as how to best conceive of prejudice against Hispanics, in addition to deciding what are the best measures of economic competition that would relate to the politics of immigration.

160 Final Thoughts

This dissertation is able to shed light on the need to expand our understanding of the various forms national identity attachment can take to affect individual political behavior. My research points to the need for scholars to view national identity as more than a simple self-categorization into a national group. Citizens identify with their nation in a variety of ways given a specific issue at hand. The findings suggest that in the case of immigration, national identity attachment works in a specific way for established group members. Specifically, citizens expect immigrants to demonstrate loyalty and attachment through legal status, and become threatened when the symbolic privileges of

American identity are being threatened by offering them freely to (non)attached immigrants. Their hostility is due to the lofty expectations they have as self-perceived high status group members, who are especially prone to symbolic threats to identity.

These strong effects of threats to identity in the case of immigration should be a first step towards developing more questions about how perceived high status group memberships might also affect hostile attitudes toward a variety of policies. Future research should therefore attempt to understand how these important social identity dynamics might operate within policy realms other than immigration.

161

Works Cited

Abowd, John M., and Richard B. Freeman. 1991. Immigration, Trade, and the Labor Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Abrajano, Marisa and Simran Singh. 2009. “Examining the Link between Issue Attitudes and News Source: The Case of Latinos and Immigration Reform.” Political Behavior. 31: 1-30.

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswick, E, Levinson, D. J., and R. Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Norton.

Aiken, L.S. and S.G. West. 1991. Multiple Regression: Testing and Interpreting Interaction. Newbury Park: Sage.

Alvarez, R. M., & Butterfield, T. L. 2000. The resurgence of nativism in California? The case of Proposition 187 and illegal immigration. Social Science Quarterly. 81: 167- 179.

American National Election Studies. 1992.

Barreto, Matt A. 2007. “The Role of Latino Candidates in Mobilizing Latino Candidates.” In Latino Politics: Identity, Mobilization, and Representation. Rodolfo Espino, David L. Leal, and Kenneth J. Meier (Eds.). University of Virginia Press.

Bennett, Brian. “Obama administration sets record number of deportations.” Los Angeles Times article, October 2011.

Berinsky, Adam J. 2002. “Silent Voices: Social Welfare Policy Opinions and Political Equality in America.” American Journal of Political Science. 46: 276-287.

Bernard, William S. 1980. “Immigration: History of U.S. Policy.” In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Stephan Thernstrom (Ed.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 162

Binder, Norman E., J.L. Polinard and Robert D. Wrinkle. 1997. “Mexican American and Anglo Attitudes Toward Immigration Reform: A View from the Border” Social Science Quarterly 78 (2): 324-337.

Borjas, George J. 1990. Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy. Basic Books.

Borjas, George J., and Richard B. Freeman, eds. 1992. Immigration and the work force: Economic consequences for the United States and source areas. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Borjas, George J. 1996. “The New Economics of Immigration.” The Atlantic Monthly. November: 72-80.

Borjas, George J. 1999. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Brader, Ted, Nicholas A. Valentino, and Elizabeth Suhay. 2008. “What Triggers public opposition to immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat.” American Journal of Political Science. 52(4): 959-978.

Brader, Ted, Nicholas A. Valentino, and Ashley Jardina. 2010. “U.S. Immigration Opinion: Material Interests, General Ethnocentrism, or Group Specific Animus?” Working paper.

Brader, Ted. 2010. “The Racial Divide on Immigration Opinion: Why Blacks are Less Threatened by Immigrants.” Paper presented at the American Political Science Association meeting. Washington, D.C.

Brown, Mark. “Gutierrez praises new Obama deportation policy, warns against predators.” Chicago Sun Times article, August 2011.

Brown, Rupert. 1995. Prejudice: Its Social Psychology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Brambor, Thomas, William Roberts Clark, and Matt Golder. 2005. “Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses.” Political Analysis. 13: 1-20.

Branscombe, N.R., and D.L. Wann. 1994. Collective Self-esteem Consequences of Outgroup Derogation When a Valued Social Identity is on Trial. European Journal of Social Psychology. 24: 641-657.

Branscombe, Nyla R., Naomi Ellemers, Russell Spears, and Berjtan Doojse. 1999. “The Context and Content of Social Identity Threat.” In Social Identity: Context, Commitment, Content. Ellemers, Spears, and Doosje (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

163

Brewer, Marilyn. 1979. Ingroup bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin. 86: 307-324.

Brewer, Marilyn and Rupert Brown. 1997. “Intergroup Relations.” In the Handbook of Social Psychology. Daniel Todd Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey. (Eds.) Boston and New York: McGraw Hill.

Burns, Peter, and James G. Gimpel. 2000. “Economic Insecurity, Prejudicial Stereotypes, and Public Opinion on Immigration Policy.” Political Science Quarterly 115(2): 201-225.

Calavita, Kitty. 1996. “The New Politics of Immigration: ‘Balanced-Budget Conservatism’ and the symbolism of Proposition 187.” Social Problems. 43(3): 284- 305.

Camarota, Steven A. 1997. "The Effect of Immigrants on the Earnings of Low-skilled Native Workers: Evidence from the June 1991 Current Population Survey." Social Science Quarterly. Vol. 78.

Chirot, D. 2001. “Introduction.” In Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions. D. Chirot & M. E. P. Seligman (Eds.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Citrin, Jack, Donald P. Green, Christopher Muste, and Cara Wong. 1997. “Public Opinion toward Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations.” Journal of Politics. 59(3): 858-881.

Citrin, Jack, Beth Reingold, and Donald Phillip Green. 1990. “American Identity and the Politics of Ethnic Change.” Journal of Politics. 52: 1124-1154.

Dawson, J. F. and A. W. Richter. 2006. Interpreting Interaction Effects. Retrieved from www.jeremydawson.co.uk/slopes.htm. de Figueiredo, Rui J. P., Jr., and Zachary Elkins. 2003. “Are Patriots Bigots? An Inquiry into the Vices of In-Group Pride.” American Journal of Political Science. 47(1): 171-88.

Dunaway, Johanna, Regina Branton, and Marisa Abrajano. 2010. “Agenda Setting, Public Opinion, and the Issue of Immigration Reform.” Social Science Quarterly. 91(2): 359-378.

Espenshade, Thomas J., and G. A. Huber. 1998. “Antecedents and Consequences of Tightening Welfare Eligibility for U.S. Immigrants.” In Immigration, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Germany and the United States (Eds. Hermann Kurthen, Jurgen Fijalkowski, and Gert Wagner). Stamford, CT: JAI Press, Inc.

164 Espenshade, Thomas J., Michael Fix, Wendy Zimmerman, and Thomas Corbett. 1996. “Immigration and Social Policy: New Interest in an Old Issue.” Focus 18(2): 1-11.

Espenshade, T. and K. Hempstead. 1996. “Contemporary american attitudes toward U.S. immigration.” International Migration Review. 30: 535–570.

Espenshade, Thomas J., and Charles A. Calhoun. 1993. “An Analysis of Public Opinion Toward Undocumented Immigration.” Population Research and Policy Review. 12: 189-224.

Federico, Christopher M. 2004. “When do Welfare Attitudes Become Racialized? The Paradoxical Effects of Education.” American Journal of Political Science. 48(2): 374- 391.

Fetzer, Joel S. 2000. Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gay, Claudine. 2006. “Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Toward Latinos”. American Journal of Political Science. 50 (4).

“Gingrich mocks Romney’s ‘Self-deportation’ plan for illegal immigrants.” Washington Post article, January 2012.

Gilens, Martin. 1999. Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Grant, P. R. and Brown, R. 1995. “From ethnocentrism to collective protest: Responses to relative deprivation and threats to social identity.” Social Psychology Quarterly. 58: 195-211.

Hardin, Russell. 1995. One and For All: The Logic of Group Conflict. Princeton University Press.

Harwood, E. 1983. “Alienation: American Attitudes toward Immigration.” Public Opinion. 6: 49-51.

Hainmueller, Jens and Michael J. Hiscox. 2010. “Attitudes toward Highly Skilled and Low-Skilled Immigration: Evidence from a Survey Experiment.” American Political Science Review 104: 61-84.

Hingham, John. 1955 [1988]. Strangers in the Land: Patters of American Nativism, 1860-1925. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Hood, M.V., III, and Irwin L. Morris. 1997. “Amigo o Enemigo?: Context, attitudes, and Anglo Public Opinion toward Immigration” Social Science Quarterly 78 (2): 309-323.

165 Hood, M.V., III, and Irwin L. Morris. 1998. “Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor,…But Make Sure They Have a Green Card: The Effects of Documented and Undocumented Migrant Context on Anglo Opinion toward Immigration.” Political Behavior 20(1):1-15.

Hopkins, Daniel J. 2010. “Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition.” American Political Science Review 104(1): 40-60.

Huber, G.A., and T.J. Espenshade. 1997. "Implications of the 1996 Welfare and Immigration Reform Acts for U.S. Immigration." Population and Development Review. 23(4): 769-801.

Huddy, Leonie, and Nadia Khatib. 2007. “American Patriotism, National Identity, and Political Involvement.” American Journal of Political Science. 51(1): 63-77.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1997. “The Erosion of National Interests.” Foreign Affairs. 76(5): 28- 49.

Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. The Hispanic Challenge. Foreign Policy. March/April.

Hurwitz, Jon and Mark Peffley. 1987. “How are foreign policy attitudes structured? A hierarchical model.” American Political Science Review: 1099-1120.

Johnson, Kirk. “Immigrant list sets off fears.” New York Times article. July, 2010.

Kahn, Carrie. “Republicans push to revise 14th amendment.” National Public Radio article, August 2010.

Kinder, Donald. 1998. “Opinion in the Realm of Politics” In the Handbook of Social Psychology (Eds. Daniel Gilbert, Susan Fiske, and Gardner Linzey). New York, New York: McGraw Hill, p. 1085.

Kinder, Donald R. and Cindy D. Kam. 2009. Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kinder, Donald R. and Lynn N. Sanders. 1996. Divided by Color: Racial politics and Democratic Ideals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kinder, Donald R. and David O. Sears. 1981. “Prejudice and Politics: Symbolic Racism versus Racial Threats to the Good Life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 40: 414-430.

Krosnick, Jon and J. Pasek. 2010. “Measuring Intent to Participate and Participation in the 2010 Census and Their Correlates and Trends: Comparisons of RDD Telephone and Non-probability Sample Internet Survey Data.” Statistical Research Division Study Series: Survey Methodology. Washington, D.C. U.S. Census Bureau.

166

Lee, Yueh-Ting, Victor Ottati, and Imtiaz Hussain. 2001. “Attitudes Toward ‘Illegal’ Immigration Into the United States: California Proposition 187.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Science. 23: 430-443.

Mayda, Anna Maria, O’Rourke, K., and Sinnott, R. 2006. “Risk, government and globalization: International survey evidence.” Working paper.

Mayda, Anna Maria, Giovanni Facchini, and Ricardo Puglisi. 2009. “Illegal immigration and media exposure.” Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting. Chicago, IL.

McConnaughy, Corrinne, Ismail White, David Leal, and Jason Casellas. 2010. “A Latino on the Ballot: Explaining Coethnic Voting Among Latinos and the Response of White Americans.” Journal of Politics. 72(4): 1-13.

Miller, David. 2000. Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Morris, Irwin L. 2000. “African American Voting on Proposition 187: Rethinking the Prevalence of Interminority Conflict.” Political Research Quarterly 53(1):77-98.

Navarrette Jr., Ruben. “Could Mitt Romney be America’s First Hispanic President?” CNN online opinion article, January 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/12/opinion/romney-hispanic-roots/index.html

Nelson, Thomas E. & Donald Kinder. 1996. “Issue Frames and Group-Centrism in American Public Opinion.” The Journal of Politics. 58(4): 1055-1078.

Oakes, P. J. and J. C. Turner. 1980. “Social categorization and intergroup behavior: Does minimal intergroup discrimination make social identity more positive?” European Journal of Social Psychology. 10: 295-301.

“Obama ‘softens’ immigration policy with mixed results.” ABC News online article. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/obama-softens-immigration-policy-with- mixed-results/

Olzak, Susan. 1992. The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

O’Rourke, K. H. and R. Sinnott. 2006. “The determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration.” European Journal of Political Economy. 22 (4), 838–861.

Page, Benjamin, and Robert Shapiro. 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends of Public Opinion. University of Chicago Press.

167 Parker, Christopher. 2009. “Symbolic versus Blind Patriotism: Distinction without difference?” Political Research Quarterly. 63(1): 97-114.

Pérez, Efrén O. 2008. Juan for All? Implicit Attitudes and U.S. Opposition to Immigration. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL.

Pew Hispanic Center. 2009-present. “Immigration Nation: Patchwork Nation.”

Preston, Julia. “Deportations under new U.S. policy are inconsistent.” New York Times article, November 2011.

Quinton, W. J., Cowan, G., & Watson, B.D. 1996. “Personality and attitudinal predictors of support of proposition 187: California’s anti-illegal immigrant intitiative.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 26: 2204-2223.

Ramakrishnan, Karthick, Esterling, Kevin, Neblo, Michael, and David Lazer. Illegality, National Origin Cues, and Public Opinion on Immigration. Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting. Chicago: April 22-24, 2010.

Ramakrishnan, Karthick, Kevin Esterling, and Michael Neblo. 2010. “Illegality, National Origin Cues, and Public Opinion on Immigration.” Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting. Chicago, IL.

Reynolds, K. J., and Turner, J. C. 2001. “Understanding prejudice, discrimination and social conflict: A social identity perspective.” In Us And Them: Understanding the psychology of prejudice and racism (Eds. M. Augoustinos & K. J. Reynolds). London, UK: Sage.

Rivers, Douglas. 2007. Understanding People: Sample matching. Palo Alto: YouGov/Polimetrix.

Scheepers, D. 2009. “Turning Social Identity threat into challenge: Status stability and cardiovascular reactivity during intergroup competition.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 45: 228-233.

Scheepers, D. and Ellemers, N. 2005. “When the Pressure is up: The assessment of threats to social identity in low and high status groups.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 41: 192-200.

Scheve, Kenneth F., and Matthew J. Slaughter. 2001. “Labor Market Competition and Individual Preferences Over Immigration Policy” Review of Economic and Statistics 83(1):133-154.

168 Schildkraut, Deborah. 2005. Press One for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schildkaraut, Deborah. 2007. “Defining American Identity in the 21st Century: How Much ‘There’ is There?” Journal of Politics, 69: 597-615.

Schildkraut, Deborah. 2011. Americanism in the Twenty-First Century: Public Opinion in the Age of Immigration. Cambridge University Press.

Schildkraut, Deborah. Forthcoming 2012. “Amnesty, Guest Workers, Fences! Oh My! Public Opinion about ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform’,” in Immigration and Public Opinion, Gary Freeman, Randall Hansen, and David Leal, eds. Routledge.

Sears, David O. and Carolyn L. Funk. 1991. “The Role of Self-Interest in Social and Political Attitudes.” In Mark P. Zanna, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24: 1-91. New York: Academic Press.

Sears, David. O. and Donald Kinder. 1971. “Racial Tensions and Voting in Los Angeles.” In Los Angeles: Viability and Prospects for Metropolitan Leadership. W Hirsch (Ed.). New York: Praeger.

Sears, David O., and Richard R. Lau. 1983. “Inducing Apparently Self-Interested Political Preferences.” American Journal of Political Science 27: 223-252.

Sheriff, Muzafer. 1966. Group Conflict and Cooperation: Their Social Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Sidanius, Jim, and Felicia Pratto. 1999. Social Dominance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sidanius, Jim, Seymour Feshbach, Shana Levin, and Felicia Pratto. 1997. “The Interface Between Ethnic and National Attachment: Ethnic Pluralism or Ethnic Dominance?” Public Opinion Quarterly. 61(1): 102-134.

Sniderman, Paul M., Hagendoorn, L., and Prior, Markus. 2004. “Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities.” American Political Science Review 98(1): 35- 49.

Smith, Rogers. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Smith, Rogers. 1988. “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Science Quarterly. 41(2): 225-251.

169 Spears, Russell, Bertjan Doosje, and Naomi Ellemers. 1999. “Commitment and the Context of Social Perception.” In Social Identity: Context, Commitment, Content. Ellemers, Spears, and Doosje (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Tajfel, Henri. 1981. Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

W.G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (33- 48). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Tamir, Y. and A. Nadler. 2007. “The role of personality in social identity: Effects of field-dependence and context on reaction to threat to group distinctiveness.” Journal of Personality. 75: 927-954.

Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth. 2009. Who Counts as an American? The Boundaries of National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Topel, Robert H. 1994. "Regional Labor Markets and the Determinants of Wage Inequality." American Economic Review. 84: 17-22.

Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse. http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/. 2012.

Turner, J. C. 1999. “Some current issues in research on social identity and self- categorization theories.” In N. Ellemers, R. Spears, & B. Doosje (Eds.) Social Identity. Oxford, England: Blackwell.

United States Citizenship & Immigration Services. September 1995 website. “Three Decades of Mass Immigration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act.” http://www.cis.org/articles/1995/back395.html.

Verba, Sidney, and Kay Schlozman. 1979. Injury to Insult. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Walton, G M. and G. L. Cohen. 2007. “A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 92: 82-96.

Winter, Nicholas V. 2006. “Beyond Welfare: Framing and the Racialization of White Opinion on Social Security.” American Journal of Political Science. 50(2): 400-420.

Wright, Matthew and Jack Citrin. 2011. “Saved by the Stars and Stripes? Images of Protest, Salience of Threat, and Immigration Attitudes”. American Politics Research.

170

Appendix A: Summary Statistics- 21st Century Americanism Survey (2004)- CH. 3

Variable Obs. Mean Stdv. Min. Max. Anti Medicaid & Food Stamps for 2307 1.66 0.68 0 2 Illegal immigrants Anti Medicaid & Food Stamps for 2308 1.68 0.66 0 2 Legal immigrants Citizen to be American 2341 3.67 0.67 1 4 Think oneself to be American 2334 3.61 0.66 1 4 Proud to be American 2354 3.78 0.52 1 4 Racial prejudice 2364 1.57 0.86 1 4 Economic competition 2348 1.86 0.50 0 2 Conservative 2364 2.08 0.86 0 3 Republican 2039 3.77 2.32 1 7 Evangelical 2364 0.31 0.46 0 1 South 2364 0.29 0.46 0 1 Income 2364 2.02 2.16 1 9 Education 2364 4.31 1.80 1 7 Female 2364 0.57 0.50 0 1 Black 2364 0.13 0.33 0 1

171

Appendix B: Summary Statistics- YouGov Polimetrix Survey (2010)- CH. 4

Variable Obs. Mean Stdv. Min. Max. Approve of SB 1070 348 3.06 1.06 1 4 TAI index 329 19.8 3.09 9 24 Threat_disloyal 346 3.07 0.97 1 4 Threat_nonwanting 350 3.10 0.95 1 4 Illegal imm. Nonwanting 349 2.94 1.02 1 4 Naturalized citizen wanting 348 3.46 0.73 1 4 Citizen American 349 3.63 0.64 1 4 Think self American 340 3.60 0.64 1 4 Racial profiling 350 0.75 0.64 0 2 Economic competition 349 3.40 0.77 1 4 Conservative 351 3.30 1.02 1 5 Republican 342 3.88 2.12 1 7 Evangelical 350 0.30 0.46 0 1 Border state 351 0.16 .37 0 1 Income 351 7.7 3.93 1 15 Education 351 3.24 1.48 1 6 Female 351 0.53 0.50 0 1 Black 351 0.12 0.33 0 1

172

Appendix C: Summary Statistics- Knowledge Networks Survey (2010)- CH. 5

Variable Obs. Mean Stdv. Min. Max. Deport illegal immigrants 1137 3.35 0.89 1 4 Interaction: Personal attachment * Imm 1129 26.0 9.97 1 40 (non)attachment Imm (non)attachment 1141 2.96 0.90 1 4 Personal attachment 1141 8.98 1.70 1 10 Racial profiling 1139 0.75 0.75 0 2 Economic competition 1138 2.39 0.74 1 3 Conservative 1138 4.25 1.49 1 7 Republican 1148 3.86 2.09 1 7 Evangelical 1146 0.31 0.46 0 1 Border state 1148 0.17 .37 0 1 Income 1148 11.11 4.26 1 19 Education 1148 2.90 0.96 1 4 Female 1148 0.55 0.50 0 1 Black 1148 .08 0.27 0 1

173

Appendix D: Support for deporting illegal immigrants, Ordered Probit

174

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Threatened American Identity

Interaction ---- 1.50*** ---- 1.20*** ---- 01.20*** (0.30) (0.30) (0.32)

(Non)Attachment 1.84*** 0.96*** 1.33*** 0.66*** 1.25*** 0.60*** (0.18) (0.25) (0.18) (0.24) (0.19) (0.24)

Personal attachment 1.09*** 0.03 1.02*** 0.19 0.88*** 0.04 (0.20) (0.28) (0.22) (0.28) (0.20) (0.23)

Racial profiling ------0.70*** 0.64*** 0.63*** 0.57*** (0.15) (0.12) (0.12) (0.12)

Economic competition ------0.52*** 0.47*** 0.36** 0.33** (0.11) (0.15) (0.16) (0.16)

Conservative ------0.26 0.23 (0.16) (0.16) Republican ------0.22 0.19 (0.18) (0.17) Evangelical ------0.09 0.11 (0.09) (0.06) Border state ------0.05 0.05 (0.10) (0.07)

Appendix D

Continued on next page

175 Appendix D, Continued.

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Income ------0.27 0.32 (0.19) (0.18) Education ------0.19 -0.19 (0.19) (0.11) Female ------0.02 -0.01 (0.07) (0.06) Black ------0.27** -0.29** (0.07) (0.05)

Adj R-squared 0.08 0.09 0.11 0.11 0.11 0.12 p-value 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 N 1131 1122 1124 1117 1114 1107

176