Familiarity Breeds Tolerance

According to Yale political scientist Dennis Huber, communities which are directly affected by immigration do not display an increase in anti-immigrant attitudes.

Dennis Huber

A narrative arose after the 2016 U.S. presidential election that Trump had used his anti-immigration platform to exploit people’s fears over immigrants moving into their neighborhoods.

To test the narrative, the researchers needed to drill down to the community level. They acquired voting-precinct data, which offer a more precise measure of people’s local experiences than county-level data, Huber said. They combined the precinct data with demographic data from the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey, which provides estimates of population changes...

They chose to study the key battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Georgia and Nevada were selected because their populations have diversified in recent years. Washington state was studied because it is less diverse and lacks significant policy conflict over immigration, Huber said.

While the study shows that people living in increasingly diverse communities aren’t as a result driven to support anti-immigrant candidates, he said, it does not challenge the idea that people are upset by demographic changes happening in the United States.

“There are people who are very upset by increasing diversity and immigration,” he said. “They just don’t appear to be living in places experiencing an increase in immigration. It does not appear to be a story about local contact.”

Comments:

1) Immigration advocates consistently conflate anti-illegal immigration with anti-immigration--in my view to tar opponents of illegal immigration as racist and xenophobic. (Your humble blogger values the rule of law higher than any specific policy and also wants more legal immigration.) I didn't see anything in the article that said the researchers distinguished the two points of view.

2) I also hope the researchers performed the basic step of excluding recent immigrants from the population who gave feedback. After all, we are trying to measure the politics of those already in place, right?

3) The study's purported result--those most upset by immigration do not have much personal experience with it themselves--is consistent with behavior of activists in other areas. For example, California environmentalists are much more opposed to fracking in North Dakota or drilling in Alaska than the people who live there.

4) The study's purported result also is consistent with a hoary principle: it's less likely that people will hate groups with whom they've had personal contact. We've seen how stereotypes melt away (not all the time, though) when people interact with others of different races, religions, cultures, and sexual orientation. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt but tolerance.

(Image from EHS Daily Advisor)