As the United States embarks upon another Presidential campaign season, we—once again—see immigration featured as a significant issue in the Republican primaries. Birthright citizenship, “anchor babies,” criminality, finger-printing, and “secure borders” are all popular rallying-cries for candidates courting a conservative electorate weary of immigrant-related diversity and change. In fact, one might suggest that immigration is more pervasive as a GOP talking point than ever before.
The prevalence and tone of this “xenoskepticism” is not incidental, as Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal argue in their book, White Backlash. The authors begin with a simple claim: “Partisan patterns, electoral decisions, and policy preferences of native white Americans are changing in response to immigration’s imprint” (p. 2). In other words, immigration matters not merely as a vague phenomenon affecting the general political climate but—crucially—exerts direct influence on partisan preferences. Their argument, in brief, is that “immigration and the Latino population do impact whites’ core political calculus” (p. 4), whereby immigration plays a role in whites becoming more Republican (p. 92).
This argument strikes me as provocative in two respects. First, and foremost, it acts on an assumption that white voting behavior is implicitly racialized and unique (in the lack of comparison of the “white population” to the voting behavior to other Americans, e.g., Asian Americans, which may also be behaviorally-susceptible to immigration). Second, it pushes against the sizable literature on the “immobility of partisanship,” suggesting that immigration is an issue important enough to accelerate the white voter along a path already inclined toward Republicanism, in spite of the inherent strictures of a two-party system.
Given the potential controversy, Abrajano and Hanjal present a straight-forward research design to support their claim. In Chapter 1, they present a simple theory “to explain how large-scale immigration can result in core political shifts in the white population” (p. 28). This theory of immigration backlash has three components: 1) the sheer size and racial diversity of Latino immigration; 2) “an on-going and often-repeated threat narrative that links the United States’ immigrant and Latino populations to a host of pernicious fiscal, social, and cultural consequences” (p. 5); and, 3) the fact that this threat narrative takes on clear partisan implications, where differences between Democrats and Republicans have become starker over time, particularly in terms of racial composition. The authors then present two causal mechanisms to account for how immigration impacts white Americans. The first is demographic change, “essentially [a story] of racial threat” (p. 47). This mechanism is direct and geographically-based, whereby concerns about immigration grow in response to a physically-changing immigrant context. The second mechanism is the media, in which individuals are exposed to information that indirectly influences partisan choice. Their accounts of these two mechanisms both get at the same idea; the mechanism means that real qua geographic threats impact partisan attachment while the second allows for perception to play a meaningful role in defining one’s sense of threat and, ultimately, one’s political calculus.
The authors then begin to deploy their vast arsenal of data and empirical tests to support their claim of partisan shift. In Chapter 2, they establish a “close connection between attitudes on immigration and partisanship” (p. 68), in which negative attitudes (particularly on undocumented migrants) correlate with Republican partisanship. Sensitive to concerns of reverse causality, the authors assess immigration’s impact on party identification over time in a series of tests. In Chapter 3, the authors move to an analysis of the link between immigration attitudes and voting. In it, they conclude that “even among those who claim ties to the Democratic Party, views of undocumented immigrants are moderately related to vote choice” (p. 102). Specifically, “white Americans’ feelings toward Latinos can be a central component in their electoral calculations” (p. 103), looking at presidential, gubernatorial and congressional voting. Significantly, they do not forward the argument that immigration was singularly-decisive in voter shift but rather the more modest claim that “immigration performs an important part in this shift” (p. 110).
Chapters 4 and 5 delve into causal mechanisms, identifying the role geographic context and the media play in the immigration backlash story. In Chapter 4, the authors probe the effects of context by looking at state-and local-level data to probe effects on immigrant-related policy preferences among whites. They find that white Americans in states with a heavy concentration of Latinos (looking at both stock and rate change) are “more likely to favor conservative and punitive policies, identify with the Republican Party, and support Republican candidates” (p. 150). In Chapter 5, the authors examine immigration stories in The New York Times over a thirty-year period, using content analysis to illustrate: 1) coverage as largely negative; and 2) how Latino framing predicts shifts in macropartisanship. Abrajano and Hajnal conclude that media is the “primary mechanism driving the public’s reaction to immigration,” maintaining also that “media coverage can lead to measurable shifts on one of the most immovable political identities” (p. 156).
Finally, Chapter 6 goes beyond partisan choice to explore the policy backlash of immigration. The authors add a new element to their aforementioned theory, specifying that “the pattern of immigration backlash should only hold until the Latino population becomes large enough to mobilize to effect policy change on its own” (p. 185). This mobilizing condition inserts a democratic agency for the Latino immigrant population, and becomes part of the analysis for what effect immigrant context has on immigrant-related policy. The findings presented here are insightful, but the late presentation of this theoretical axiom, as well as the investigation into an adjacent research question (policy output instead of political behavior of whites) distracts from both the organization and central argument of the book.
As any provocative work should do, the book raises as many questions as it provides answers. Abrajano and Hajnal adroitly navigate through this inevitability by running a considerable amount of robustness checks, addressing alternative theories with due diligence, and exercising appropriate caution when it comes to the limitations of existing data and the language of interpreting their findings. Despite this careful approach, there are inevitably a few issues worth considering.
I wonder whether this theory of immigration backlash is really a theory as opposed to a parsimonious explanation of the U.S. case. My question, of course, reflects a normative bias among most comparativists that the United States is not sui generis, as well as a methodological predilection that theories be “testable” in cases other than those used to derive it. At the very least, a historical comparison would be appropriate to establish external validity. From a comparative perspective, the question of whether a diverse population impacts native politics and policy is not novel. There is an abundance of research on European politics, for example, that shows a direct impact of immigration on partisan preferences, including but not limited to far-right parties, as well as policies as seen in the phenomenon of welfare chauvinism. What makes the United States unique in this respect is the two-party system and the inevitable contrasts and polarity between Democratic and Republican policy positions. In Europe, parties on the left and the right traditionally differ in terms of immigration policy but sit much closer together (often times in coalition-necessitating consensus) over questions of immigrant integration and social policy. I think more institutional considerations would not only help in précising the theory, but also in generalizing it.
That said, the United States is also unique in terms of how immigrants are perceived, and this raises a concern about what immigrant-related questions are actually tapping into. The authors readily admit that most categories of immigrants are “muddled together in the minds of many white Americans—especially since the majority of white Americans think that [sic] most Latinos are undocumented” (pp. 124–5). Given that, is it not possible that this may not be a story of “racial threat” but one where immigration may also or equally be about issues of illegality, security, law, and order? If (as established in Chapter 2) a “partisan transformation of white America” (p. 83) toward Republicanism is already taking place, then how do we know its immigration is accelerating the change and not the underlying issue of legality? Complementing survey data with interview work or experiments probing voting motivation could help untangle this problem. The authors begin to probe this by comparing trigger groups, but do not extend the investigation into unpacking the white baseline. Whites are treated homogenously, an issue the authors address directly but have no strategy for resolving beyond acknowledgement (p. 150). What precludes other groups undertaking the macropartisan shift from acting on threat and media cues, e.g., Asian-Americans, Jewish Americans, or even second-generation Americans? What is it about whiteness? Does anything, in principle, exclude these groups from having similar concerns about legality and other immigrant-associated policies and concerns? The lack of comparisons leaves this an open question.
At the same time, White Backlash represents a bold and challenging contribution to the study of immigration and its impact on contemporary politics and policymaking. It adds serious and sobering findings to the dialogue on race and ethnic politics, which we can only hope will be ameliorated in time.
