American Public Opinion on Immigration: Nativist, Polarized, or Ambivalent?
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Matthew Wright,Morris Levy |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12660 |
American Public Opinion on Immigration:
Nativist, Polarized, or Ambivalent?
Matthew Wright* and Morris Levy**
ABSTRACT
For Dauvergne (2016), one consequence of the “end of settler societies”is nativism, or what
she calls “mean-spirited politics”: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Multiculturalism. This
accords with the prevailing tone of public opinion literature on the subject, which links anti-
immigrant hostility in settler societies to influxes of diversity and associated racial threat. In
this essay, we determine just how closely this stylized vision of anxiety-fuelled nativism
resembles the true state of mass opinion about immigration. Using a variety of surveys fielded
in recent years, we show that Americans: 1) hold generally positive views about immigration,
though with a substantial dose of ambivalence about its consequences; 2) are not especially
consistent in their policy attitudes over time; 3) express policy attitudes that readily depart
from their underlying predispositions, and; 4) have only become more pro-immigrant in recent
years, and whatever partisan polarization exists on the issue stems from the fact that Republi-
cans are becoming more positive at a slightly slower pace than Democrats. All of this suggests
that, while there is a hard core of ethnocentrism and "mean-spiritedness" in the U.S., the pre-
vailing tone is much less negative than the standard portrayal assumes.
THE RISE OF ANTI-IMMIGRATION
In the recent intensification of public debates about immigration, Catherine Dauvergne sees the
recrudescence of nativism and the rise of a “mean-spirited politics”that is anti-immigrant, anti-
Muslim, and anti-Multiculturalism. anti-foreigner, anti-Muslim, and anti-Multiculturalism. “Never
before”, she asserts, “has the hostility towards immigrants been quite so widespread, and quite so
nasty”(Dauvergne, 2016. p. 1). To Dauvergne, this anti-immigrant turn marks nothing less than
the beginning of the end of settler societies. The United States, Canada, and Australia now “have
their own ‘cultures,’” and an “‘us-them’line”that increasingly calls to mind the ethno-nationalist
postures of “Old World States”(p. 176). Beset by Islamophobia and backlash against the politics
of asylum and multiculturalism, these “nations of immigrants”have embraced notions of “muscular
citizenship and monoculture”that have led to a) policy paralysis, and b) excessive focus on policies
that have the purpose of “ratcheting up restrictions, heightening privileges for the most attractive
migrants, and building bigger fences –literally and legally”(p. 7).
There is no question that public discourse about immigration has become more vitriolic in the
past decade. The question we pursue in this essay is to what degree a new nativism or simply
*University of British Columbia, Vancouver
** University of Southern California, Los Angeles
The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1111/imig.12660
doi: 10.1111/imig.12660
©2019 The Authors
International Migration ©2019 IOM
International Migration Vol. 58 (6) 2020
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
mean-spirited politics characterizes the opinions of ordinary Americans about immigration. Specifi-
cally, we ask how ideologically zealous Americans are in the Donald Trump era of immigration
politics. One key question is whether they seem as nativist as Dauvergne assumes (pp. 178-179).
Do they, in other words, express what historian John Higham called “an inflamed and nationalistic
type of ethnocentrism”,or“intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign
(i.e. un-American) connections”? Another possibility is that Americans have increasingly come to
resemble their elected leaders, which is to say sharply polarized and entrenched into stridently pro-
and anti-immigrant camps. In either case, what we are looking for is intensity and extremity. Nei-
ther nativism nor, for lack of a better word, “cosmopolitanism”allows much room for ambivalence
or weighing policy particulars. Instead, if the landscape is best characterized either by intense fear
and loathing, on the one hand, or a battle between camps on the other, peoples’attitudes toward
immigration should be both uniform and unshakably rigid, tethered to tribalistic notions of “us”
against “them”.
Certainly, the idea that immigration policy attitudes are intensely group-centric is widespread in
the public opinion literature. Kinder and Kam (2009), for example, assume that people anchor their
views about immigration in the extent to which they view the world ethnocentrically. Abrajano and
Hajnal (2015), similarly, argue that Americans can and do form opinions about immigration on the
basis of gut reactions to foreigners in general or Latinos in particular (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015).
This group-centric anchor for public opinion about immigration generates opinions stable and
potent enough to affect many citizens’votes and party affiliation (cf. Hajnal and Rivera, 2014).
In what follows, we canvass the last quarter century of public opinion polling on immigration
from the American National Election Study and General Social Survey to explore the degree to
which Americans are unabashedly “tribal”or ambivalent about immigration. Our assessment takes
shape as we probe four diagnostic questions:
(1) When asked about the consequences of immigration, are their answers uniformly valenced
or marked by ambivalence?
(2) How stable over time are peoples’attitudes about reducing or increasing immigration in
general?
(3) To what extent can people’s opinions about specific immigration policies be predicted based
on their general preferences about increasing or reducing immigration, and how well can
opinions about specific policies be predicted from one another?
(4) What do recent aggregate-level trends suggest about the overall prevalence of anti-immi-
grant sentiment in American public opinion, and its polarization along partisan lines?
Very few Americans are uniformly pro-immigrant or anti-immigrant
We are not the first to point out that most Americans’immigration attitudes are on some level
ambivalent. Christopher Muste (2013) describes public opinion toward immigration as characterized
by “ambivalence and negativity”. Elsewhere, Deborah Schildkraut (2013) describes mass opinion in
similar terms. Both note that opinions about the effects of immigration are divided, and both
describe how the distribution varies a great deal by issue. Yet these observations come from snap-
shots of the public in the aggregate. From that vantage, an “ambivalent”public could be closely
divided but also sharply polarized into pro- and anti-immigrant camps. What is more, we can say
relatively little about the number or relative strength of motivations at work. Finally, many of those
who hold diffusely positive attitudes about the idea of immigration as a defining aspect of Ameri-
can history could still hold consistently negative attitudes about immigration today.
Thus, we need to examine the stability, rigidity, and cross-policy variability in opinion not only
in the aggregate at the individual level. We begin with a (seemingly) straightforward question: do
78 Wright and Levy
©2019 The Authors. International Migration ©2019 IOM
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