Legislation, Linguistics, and Location: Exploring Attitudes on Unauthorized Immigration
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Legislation, Linguistics, and Location: Exploring Attitudes on Unauthorized Immigration David A. Caicedo 1
& Vivienne
Badaan 2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Contemporary discourse on domestic immigration policy varies widely based on political affiliation, linguistics, and regional differences. This experimental study aimed to concurrently investigate three social psychological bases of attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants in the USA: political ideology, social labels, and social context. Participants were 744 adults, recruited from “New York Community College” (“NYCC”/urban) and “New Jersey Community College” (“NJCC”/suburban), who were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: “illegal” vs. “undocumented.” Participants completed a scale measuring their attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants with the embedded label manipulation, followed by the General System Justification scale, and culminating with demographic items. Results demonstrated that whereas social context and political ideology both contributed significantly to the regression model, the social labels did not. Both high system justification and political conservatism predicted negative attitudes, but the latter effect was stronger for suburban students. Post hoc analyses revealed a significant difference between suburban and urban students in the frequency of the social labels “illegal” and “undocumented” heard and seen among family members, friends, and the media. Implications are discussed with a focus on system justification as an explanatory theory for immigration attitudes, as well as contextual effects for it. Keywords Immigration . Social labels . Political ideology . Political orientation . System
Justification . Social context
* David A. Caicedo [email protected]
1
Department of Social Sciences, Human Services, and Criminal Justice, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, 199 Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007, USA
2
Department of Psychology, New York University, Meyer Hall, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA
Caicedo D.A., Badaan V.
“Times have changed, and whenever they change for the worse, as they have, ingroup boundaries tend to tighten. The stranger is suspect and excluded.” (Allport 1954) To say that we are in a time of change in the USA would be an understatement. In regard to immigration, there has been a major change to the typical pattern of settlement—namely, an increasing number of immigrants are eschewing the traditional urban centers for more suburban and rural pastures. This, in turn, has spurred on a change in attitudes from suburban and rural residents—specifically, switching from a focus on White-Black relations to a native-foreign perspective. This then has incurred a change in how researchers view intergroup relations and attitudes concerning this demographic and contextual shift—from the typical sociodemographic antecedents (e.g., political orientation, race, education, and income) on these attitudes to more socio-contextual factors (e.g.,
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