Most of our political science models of U.S. public opinion are structured on understandings of white public opinion. Perhaps this makes sense given that whites have been the dominant racial group for much of the nation’s history. However, issues of race have been present since the nation’s founding. Furthermore, given that the United States is an increasingly diverse society, it is all the more imperative to understand the factors that shape public opinion across different groups in society. In The Politics of Belonging, Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn do just that, shining an important light on the way that one’s position in the American racial hierarchy affects public opinion differentially across groups on the issue of immigration.
According to the authors’ Racial Prism of Group Identity Model (RPGI), “Groups lower in the racial order experience more constraint as a function of their position of relative powerlessness and the negative stereotypes associated with their race. A person’s position in the American racial hierarchy thus creates systematic variation in group identity and sense of belonging, which in turn influence attitudes on immigration” (p. 2). Masuoka and Junn characterize the shape of the American racial hierarchy with whites on top, African Americans on the bottom, and Latinos and Asians in between, with Asians closer to whites. One’s position in the racial hierarchy affects two aspects of identity that, they argue, are particularly relevant for immigration attitudes: group identity, conceived of as a sense of linked fate with one’s group, and conceptions of American national identity. According to their theory, whites with a strong sense of linked fate will be more likely to support exclusionary policies on immigration, since they want to preserve their status at the top of the racial hierarchy. However, minorities with a strong sense of linked fate will be less supportive of such policies, since they are more attuned to the marginalization of different groups in U.S. society. All groups with a strong sense of American identity will hold more restrictive attitudes. The authors contend that these features will also impact susceptibility to political communication strategies, whereby whites, as the dominant group, will be more influenced by political communication that paints immigrants in a negative light than will minorities.
The theoretical arguments advanced by Masuoka and Junn mark an original and important contribution to an understanding of immigration policy attitudes. Existing work has looked at a wide range of individual-level factors that influence opinions in this domain, including race and ethnicity. However, as the authors rightfully point out, scholars have tended to include only dummy variables to control for race, with whites as the baseline category, which tells us whether opinions on immigration differ between whites and non-whites but does not get to the more important question of why opinions might differ across groups. With this in mind, Masuoka and Junn offer a compelling argument for some of the factors that may be particularly relevant in shaping attitudes in this domain. Furthermore, they provide a methodological approach for testing these relationships, which they label a comparative relational analysis approach; it entails estimating separate regression models for the four main groups that they treat in the text. This approach is appropriate for testing the arguments they advance and is one that more scholars should be using, especially in circumstances when one expects the effects of different factors on opinions to vary across groups.
The first three empirical chapters elaborate on the development of the American racial hierarchy—how this hierarchy affects group stereotypes as well as one’s sense of belonging to the nation and one’s group. After taking the reader through the history of belonging in the American polity, the authors show that whites hold the most negative stereotypes toward minorities and positive stereotypes toward their own group, while minorities hold lower positive in-group stereotypes and more negative stereotypes of their own group. The authors then connect one’s position in the American racial hierarchy to one’s sense of belonging. They argue that whites should be the most likely to see themselves as typical Americans and be less concerned with enforcing boundaries with respect to American identity; African Americans may enforce more rigid boundaries while recognizing that they are not typical; and Latinos and Asians may see more porous boundaries while recognizing that they are not typical. The results from an analysis of survey data largely confirm these arguments, but the size of the differences between groups is not substantively large, though we may not expect large differences for American identity. Given that minorities are more peripheral members of the American polity, Masuoka and Junn argue that blacks should have the strongest sense of linked fate to their own group and that it should be most consequential for the formation of their opinions on issues related to race, followed by Latinos, Asians, and, lastly, whites. Their findings again largely confirm their arguments, except for Latinos, for whom the results are more mixed, though there is not much discussion as to why this is the case.
The authors then connect the shape of the American racial hierarchy and sense of belonging to immigration attitudes using survey data. As expected, the authors find that across all four groups, those with a strong sense of American identity prefer to have fewer immigrants entering the United States. Linked fate also works according to expectations, with whites high in linked fate preferring fewer immigrants and Asians, blacks, and Latinos high in linked fate showing less restrictionist preferences. The authors find that the effects of American identification are robust to two other measures of immigration policy attitudes; however, the effects of linked fate are more inconsistent for African Americans, Asians, and whites, though they are consistent with expectations for Latinos. While I very much like what the authors do in this chapter, it would have benefited from more discussion of why linked fate works so well for Latinos but seems to have less consistent effects for Asians and African Americans across the three policy issues, especially given that linked fate was weakest among Latinos in the earlier chapter and did not always structure racial opinions. Furthermore, given that the authors argue for the primacy of these measures of identity for understanding attitudes on immigration, it would have been useful to provide more discussion of the size of the substantive effects of identity relative to other predictors in the model.
In the last empirical chapter, the authors test their arguments related to susceptibility to political communication on immigration. They argue that the illegal/legal immigrant distinction should matter the most to whites who seek to uphold norms and their position in the racial hierarchy; African Americans should be least affected, while raising the illegal frame may activate in-group identity among Latinos, making them even more supportive of progressive immigration policies. Using data from the 2006 Pew Immigration Survey, Masuoka and Junn show that blacks and Latinos see less of a distinction between legal and illegal immigration than whites, as expected, and Latinos hold the least restrictive attitudes. They claim that these findings provide some preliminary support for their arguments, though they acknowledge that the tests related to the illegal/legal distinction are not causal. It would have helped to have more discussion of how these analyses link back to susceptibility to elite communication. That is, how do these survey questions proxy for elite communication?
The second half of the chapter reports on a priming experiment in which the authors varied whether a segment about immigration had no picture, a picture of a Latino immigrant, or a picture of an Asian immigrant. As expected, they only see less restrictive attitudes emerge among whites across conditions, while African Americans come to hold less restrictive attitudes when exposed to a picture of either group; however, they find no differences across conditions for Asians or Latinos. To better test their arguments, it may have been worth incorporating a condition with a white immigrant (Ted Brader, Nicholas A. Valentino, and Elizabeth Suhay, “What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety Group Cues and Immigration Threat,” American Journal of Political Science 52:4 [Sep. 2008]: 959–78), testing whether the conditions activate ethnocentrism as they argue (Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundation of American Opinion, 2009), and presenting a negative stereotype of both groups, which might have been more effective in activating in-group identity among Asians and Latinos. I found the design of the empirical tests less convincing in this chapter compared to those in other chapters, but the authors have laid out a convincing argument for future research to tackle.
In sum, Masuoka and Junn provide a rich theoretical story of how one’s position in the American racial hierarchy influences one’s sense of belonging, which in turn affects opinions on immigration policy. The text deftly weaves together the development of the argument, with support backed up with empirics. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding opinions on immigration, but the contribution goes well beyond that. As the authors argue: “While racial patterns in opinion are not present for all issues, for those with clear racial undertones such as immigration policy, position in the racial hierarchy is the key feature to explain differences in opinion” (p. 5). Future scholars can apply the RPGI model in order to understand a wide range of issues in the American polity.
