It’s perhaps unsurprising that views of immigrants vary considerably according to political affiliation. Research from New York University finds that whereas Democrats tend to have uniformly positive views, Republicans are much more polarized.
“While there has been a lot of research on immigration, not much is known about what people think about immigrants themselves,” the researchers explain. “By focusing on attitudes Americans hold towards immigrants rather than immigration, this study adds depth and nuance to our understanding of public opinion on immigration issues—and how they vary by political party.”
Different views
The study sheds light on contrasting responses between Democrats and Republicans concerning messages about immigrants. Notably, Republicans tend to interpret political rhetoric on immigration in distinct ways: anti-immigrant discourse is perceived as pertaining to unauthorized immigrants, while pro-immigrant messaging encompasses immigrants in general, including legal immigrants. Conversely, Democrats view both anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant narratives as referring to immigrants as a whole, rejecting the former while embracing the latter.
To examine Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants, the researchers conducted a survey in 2021 involving over 2,000 participants. The survey utilized NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel, which represents a diverse sample of the US population, facilitating tailored studies for researchers.
To assess attitudes, they presented participants with both pro- and anti-immigrant messages. These messages were derived from comprehensive analyses of approximately 28,000 press releases and web pages discussing “issues” by Republicans and Democrats in the US House of Representatives, as well as content from the Trump and Obama White House websites. The messages themselves were sourced from actual political speeches given by Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
Participants were exposed to either a pro- or an anti-immigrant message and subsequently asked to rate their agreement or disagreement on a 7-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
Deeper insights
To gain deeper insights into the drivers of participants’ responses, the researchers posed specific follow-up questions to subsets of the surveyed individuals. For instance, participants were asked whether they perceived the message as “mostly fact” or “mostly opinion.” Others were requested to provide a concise, open-ended summary of the message they had read.
The textual content of these summaries was then analyzed, focusing on the presence or absence of terms related to legal status (e.g., “legal,” “illegal,” “undocumented,” and “unauthorized”) and immigration (e.g., “immigrant,” “immigration,” “migrant,” and “refugee”).
In addition to political party affiliation, the study also took into account self-identified Independents. Overall, Republicans demonstrated agreement with the anti-immigrant narrative, while Democrats rejected this characterization. Independents, though less definitively, also leaned towards disagreement with this message.
Conversely, all three parties exhibited alignment when confronted with positive messaging about immigrants in general, commonly referred to as the “worthy immigrant” narrative. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents expressed varying degrees of agreement with this pro-immigrant message, with Republicans showing slightly less fervent agreement compared to Democrats and Independents.
Mixed perspectives
These findings prompt an obvious question: How is it possible to simultaneously agree with both anti- and worthy-immigrant narratives, as observed among Republicans? In an attempt to address this question, Asbury-Kimmel turned to the responses provided in the follow-up questions, which offered some clarity regarding these seemingly contradictory responses.
Overall, approximately one-third of the respondents perceived the anti-immigrant narrative as predominantly factual. In contrast, a larger portion—half of the surveyed participants—considered the worthy-immigrant narrative as predominantly factual.
Secondly, a majority of Democrats and Independents regarded the anti-immigrant narrative as primarily opinion-based, while most Republicans deemed it to be largely factual. Conversely, a majority of Democrats believed the worthy-immigrant narrative to be factual, whereas most Republicans considered it to be opinion-based. Notably, Independents were divided evenly, with the majority of those leaning Democratic perceiving the message as fact and the majority of those leaning Republican considering the worthy-immigrant narrative to be mostly opinion.
Thirdly, Republicans were notably more likely than Democrats to include references to immigration status in their written summaries of the anti-immigrant narrative. Conversely, Democrats were significantly more inclined to mention immigrants without incorporating legal status, while Republicans and Independents fell in between on this aspect.
“In other words, Republicans were more likely to state that the anti-immigrant message was about unauthorized immigrants and Democrats were more likely to state that the message was about immigrants in general,” the authors conclude
“Democrats and Republicans have different interpretations of the same messages,” they add. “These interpretative differences can help us understand why Republicans agree with negative and positive characterizations of immigrants and why Democrats strongly embrace positive and firmly reject negative characterizations.”
