Graduate School of Social Sciences
The Salience of Immigration
&
Immigrant Perceptions of Discrimination
MSc Thesis Political Science: International Relations
Research Project: Micro-‐Foundations of Conflict
Amsterdam, June 23
rd2017
Author:
Supervisor and Second Reader
Roland S. Kielman
Dr. Seiki Tanaka
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ... 3
Chapter 1 - Introduction ... 5
Chapter 2 Literature Review ... 8
2.1 National and Subnational Immigration Policy Making ... 8
2.2 Individual Attitudes Towards Immigration ... 9
2.3 Immigrant Perceptions of Discrimination ... 11
Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework ... 13
3.1 Issue Salience, Identity and Perceptions of Discrimination ... 14
3.2 Immigration’s Legislative Salience ... 16
3.3 Immigration’s Media Salience ... 20
Chapter 4 Research Design ... 22
4.1 Case Selection ... 22
4.2 Data and Methods ... 24
4.2.1 Dependent Variable: Hispanic Immigrant PD ... 24
4.2.2 Independent Variable: Immigration’s Media Salience ... 26
4.2.3 Independent Variable: Immigration’s Legislative Salience ... 30
4.2.4 Control Variables ... 34
Chapter 5 Results & Analysis ... 35
5.1 Trends in Immigration’s Media Salience ... 35
5.2 Trends in Immigration’s Legislative Salience ... 38
5.3 The Relationship between Immigration’s Salience & Immigrant PD ... 42
5.3.1 Descriptive Statistics & Trends in Perceptions of Discrimination ... 42
5.3.2 Immigration’s Legislative Salience and Immigrant PD ... 43
5.3.3 Immigration’s Media Salience and Immigrant PD ... 47
5.4 Discussion ... 50
5.4.1 Study Limitations ... 53
Chapter 6 Conclusion ... 55
6.1 Theoretical Implications & Future Research ... 56
6.2 Practical Implications ... 57
7 References ... 59
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Since the turn of the century, immigration has emerged as a highly salient issue in societal and political discourse in the United States. This is in part a reflection of the dramatic increase in the size of the foreign born population experienced in the U.S. over the course of the past fifty years. As of 2015, 43 million immigrants were living in the United States, representing a fourfold increase since 1970 (Pew Research Center, 2017). At the same time, the demographic makeup of this population experienced a significant shift. Whereas the bulk of the immigrant population in 1970 was comprised of individuals from Europe and Canada, today the vast majority of immigrants come from nations in Latin America and South and East Asia (Ibid). Far from a uniform ‘immigrant experience’, contemporary American immigrants come from a diverse collection of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Today’s immigrants to the United States also face a myriad of local and national contexts that shape the environment in which they live. Unlike earlier generations of American immigrants, contemporary immigrants increasingly settle in ‘new immigrant destinations’ (Pew Research Center, 2016) that often lack both the experience and resources necessary to incorporate new immigrant populations (Marrow, 2013).
The extent to which immigrants perceive themselves to be the victims of discrimination offers a strong indication of how well they are being incorporated into society (Dion, 2001). As Dion concludes, ‘perceived discrimination by immigrants inversely reflects their satisfactory or successful incorporation: the greater the perceived discrimination, the less successful the immigrants’ incorporation into a receiving society (2001: 524)’. Today, scholars and political activists typically agree that perceiving discrimination is a fairly common occurrence for members of minority groups living in developed countries (Operario and Fiske, 2001). Earlier research on perceptions of discrimination (PD) has shown that PD influences a litany of socioeconomic, political and health-related outcomes (Borre et al., 2010; Hopkins et al., 2016; Pedraza et al., 2017; Schildkraut, 2011; Vargas et al., 2017). Given the myriad consequences of perceiving discrimination on an individual’s wellbeing, scholars have attempted to better understand the factors that contribute to individual PD, while focusing mainly on individual-level factors (Hopkins et al., 2016). Very little is known about how macro-level factors influence individual perceptions of discrimination.
Here, the social and political climate that envelops contemporary immigrants is of considerable importance. An individual’s environment influences their perceptions of discrimination (Zbarauskaitė et al., 2015), and prior research shows that the foreign-born
population of the United States is highly aware of and sensitive to the political and social atmosphere that constitutes a part of the environment in which they live (Cropper, 2012). Within this context, this study seeks to contribute to the understanding of immigrant perceptions of discrimination by addressing the following research question: To what extent are immigrant perceptions of discrimination influenced by the salience of ‘immigration’ in political and social discourse?
To investigate the possible link between immigration’s salience and immigrant PD, this study focuses on perceptions of discrimination amongst Hispanic immigrants in the United States. This decision is based on two primary factors. First, over the course of the past two decades, the growing and increasingly diverse foreign-born population of the U.S. became entangled with national and local concerns over unauthorized immigration, national security and economic security (Hopkins, 2010; Hopkins et al., 2016). In turn, immigration became highly politicized (Saenz and Manges, 2015), and society is engaged in a fierce debate about how welcoming the country should be to new immigrants and to what extent unauthorized immigrants should be accommodated or criminalized. Intense political rhetoric and heightened media scrutiny have come to characterize this tumultuous debate (Hopkins, 2010), suggesting that immigration is indeed a pertinent issue in American society. It thus represents an important case for investigation of a possible link between immigration’s salience and immigrant PD.
Second, prior research suggests that Hispanic immigrants are primed to view immigration as a highly salient issue (Pedraza et al., 2017). As the largest immigrant group in the U.S., Hispanic Americans remain closely tied to the immigrant experience (Ibid). The vast majority of Hispanic Americans report having personal relationships with undocumented immigrants, the group most frequently targeted by anti-immigrant sentiment, immigration policymaking and media coverage related to immigration (Vargas et al., 2017). With this in mind, identifying the extent to which the immigration debate influences Hispanic immigrants’ PD and overall wellbeing can yield important clues about patterns of inequality in the future.
In this study, I argue that ‘immigration’ is not only a salient issue for Hispanic immigrants, but that ebbs and flows in its salience can directly influence how these individuals perceive discrimination. The basis of this argument stems from two conventional measurements of issue salience: the degree to which immigration is the subject of widespread political debate and the extent to which messages surrounding this issue are conveyed in the news media (Wlezien, 2005). Here, I argue that both of these expressions of immigration’s salience can influence immigrant PD. This is achieved by elevating the salience of individuals’ ethnic
identities – which is plausible given the ongoing ‘racialization’ of the immigration debate in the United States (Saenz and Manges, 2015). By prompting individuals to more readily incorporate aspects of their ethnicity into their social identity, social identity theory would predict that these individuals are also more likely to attribute negative personal encounters and threatening contexts to discrimination based on their membership in their respective ethnic group (Perez, 2015).
This research contributes to the academic study of immigration and perceptions of discrimination in three distinct ways. First, it offers empirical evidence to support the claim that immigration has indeed been a highly salient issue in American society since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In similar fashion, it offers empirical support to previous studies that indicate that increased immigration policymaking at the state level forms a crucial part of the immigration debate in United States (Rivera, 2016; Ybarra et al., 2016). By identifying trends and patterns in this legislative activity, this research also contributes to the academic understanding of where and why legislatures choose to enact restrictive or inclusive immigration policies. Second, this study can enhance our collective understanding of the psychological wellbeing of the Hispanic immigrant population by examining potential variations in their perceptions of discrimination across spatial and temporal bounds. Comprehensive reviews of Hispanic immigrant sentiment, including perceptions of discrimination, are generally lacking in contemporary literature on the Hispanic immigrant experience in the United States (Rivera, 2017). With this in mind, an investigation of PD amongst this population can yield important clues about the extent to which members of this population feel comfortable in their new home. Finally, from a theoretical standpoint, this study hopes to initiate a longer-term discussion of how macro-level factors such as anti-immigrant political and social contexts may influence the attitudes and perceptions of Hispanic immigrants. Given the negative repercussions of individuals perceiving discrimination, there is great utility in examining the role played by anti-immigrant climates in the formation of these perceptions.
This study proceeds as follows. Chapter Two begins with an overview of extant literature related to the role of individual attitudes related to immigration, while endeavoring to situate the study of perceptions of discrimination within the broader scope of immigration-related research. Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework that underpins my expectation that the salience of immigration can influence immigrant PD; it also introduces the two proxies that I deploy as the primary measurements of immigration’s salience: 1) anti-immigrant policymaking at the state level, and 2) media coverage of immigration-related stories. Chapter 4 outlines my research design, including the operationalization of my primary variables. Chapter 5 follows with an
analysis of my findings, including an in-depth look at immigration’s salience between 2002 and 2016. Chapter 6 hosts a discussion of this study’s findings and observable limitations. The final Chapter offers my concluding observations, including theoretical and practical implications for future research.
Chapter 2 Literature Review
Prior research on the topic of immigration offers important clues about how the salience of immigration in political and social discourse can influence immigrant perceptions of discrimination. Perceptions of discrimination are influenced by an individual’s environment (Zbarauskaitė et al., 2015) and contemporary immigrants in the United States are exposed to myriad of social and political climates that are dictated by both legislative policies as well as local contexts shaped by individual and group-level responses from native citizens (Hopkins, 2010; Hopkins et al., 2016: 1; Perez, 2015; Rivera, 2016; Ybarra et al., 2016). As a consequence, the best way to understand the undulating environment in which contemporary U.S. immigrants find themselves is to first examine what shapes immigration policy and individual attitudes towards immigrants. To this end, the chapter begins with a brief overview of prior research related to the determinants of immigration policy making at the national level. It then transitions into a discussion of the factors that have been shown to influence immigration legislation at the state-level in the United States, which serves as one of the primary units of analysis in this study. This is followed by an in-depth look at prior research on the attitudes of native citizens towards immigration policy and immigrants. I then present an overview of previous literature related to perceptions of discrimination amongst immigrants. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how this study can help fill existing gaps in the literature related to immigration and immigrant perceptions of discrimination.
2.1 National and Subnational Immigration Policy Making
Understanding the dynamics of migration and immigration policy is critical to political science research, yet it is an area that has only recently gained momentum due to advances in data on immigration policies and migration flows (Helbling and Michalowski, 2017). This has allowed for political scientists to conduct more systematic evaluations of the determinants of immigration policy over spatial and temporal bounds (Ibid). Today it is generally agreed that historical factors such as settlement patterns and colonialism, institutional factors, and international context all play a role in determining immigration policies at the national level (Scheve and Slaughter, 2001). To
date, the bulk of this research has been conducted across immigrant receiving nations in Western Europe and North America (Bansak, Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2016) where recent influxes of immigrants have brought immigration issues to the forefront of political debate.
In the Untied States, scholars have committed considerable attention to better understanding the dynamics of subnational immigration policymaking. Here, the absence of comprehensive federal immigration reform prompted states to take a leading role in immigration policymaking during the last two decades (Hopkins et al., 2016). The end result was an unprecedented wave of legislative activity, with states adopting more than 2,400 immigration-related bills between 2005 and 2014 (Rivera, 2016). What is notable about this flurry of legislation is the strikingly different ways that state legislatures responded to immigration (Hopkins, 2010; Hopkins et al., 2016; Perez, 2015; Rivera, 2016; Ybarra et al., 2016). Policies ranged from highly inclusive to highly exclusionary, meaning that contemporary immigrants in the U.S. are now ‘exposed to a wider variety of social and political climates than their predecessors a generation ago (Hopkins, 2016: 1).’
In examining why some states adopt anti-immigrant legislation while others take a more inclusive approach, scholars have demonstrated that a diversity of factors play a role in initiating and shaping state-level immigration policy. In their comprehensive summary of state immigration policymaking, Ybarra et al. (2016) highlight that state ideology, population demographics, state wealth, legislative professionalism, and unionization levels can all play a role in the initiation and design of state immigration policy. At the same time, the presence and/or growth of legal and undocumented immigrant populations have also been shown to play an influential role, particularly when combined with periods of poor economic growth or heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric (Hopkins, 2010; Ybarra et al., 2016). Additionally, states are more likely to adopt restrictive immigration policy when they have (1) rapid increases in immigrant populations, (2) conservative legislatures, (3) a part-time legislature (such as Texas, which only convenes in odd-number years), and (4) when they border states that have enacted restrictive immigration policies (Petrzelka and Jacobs, 2016). Conversely, states are more likely to adopt inclusive policies when they have (1) a slow growth rate of foreign-born individuals, (2) more liberal ideology among state residents and their legislative body, (3) a full-time state legislature, and (4) when neighboring states have enacted inclusive immigration policies (Ibid).
2.2 Individual Attitudes Towards Immigration
Political scientists have recently turned their attention to better understanding the role of individual attitudes related to immigration and immigrants (Ibid). Successfully understanding
attitudes and perceptions related to immigration has important theoretical and practical implications for political scientists, policymakers and individual citizens for a number of reasons. First, public attitudes are likely to influence public policymaking, particularly in the United States and European Union, where it is difficult to enact or sustain policies without public support (Bansak, Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2016). Second, individual and group perspectives are likely to influence day-to-day behaviors, which may have an effect on the success and satisfaction of natives and immigrants, the social climate of the host society, and determine whether immigration is successful overall for the host nation (Esses et al., 2001). Third, immigration perspectives may influence the collective vision of national identity and the perception of who is and who is not a member of the national ingroup (Esses et al., 2001; Pedraza et al., 2017). This is important as it signifies who society considers ‘worthy of sharing national resources and the priority that the well-being of members of different groups is given in economic and social policies’ (Esses et al., 2001: 71). Lastly, the study of perceptions and attitudes in immigration may involve dynamics that are not present in traditional investigations related to majority-minority relations (Esses and Dovidio, 2001; 378):
Whereas the study of Black-White relations in the United States examines groups of relatively stable sizes who share culture, history, and civic rights, immigration involves significant dynamic population shifts, potentially fundamental differences in language and cultural values, and (depending on the legal status of immigrants) differential rights and privileges. Because of the dynamic and complex nature of the issues associated with immigration, the relations between immigrants and members of a receiving society can be highly contentious.
Extant research on individual attitudes towards immigration has focused primarily on the attitudes of native citizens (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). This line of enquiry has become particularly relevant across nations in Western Europe and North America, where public opinion plays an important role in the formation of public policy and where recent influxes of immigrants and asylum seekers have brought immigration issues to the forefront of political debate (Bansak, Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2016). As a consequence, the majority of research into immigration attitudes has concentrated in these regions and focused on the attitudes of majority groups in receiving nations towards immigrants (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). This scholarship is grounded in a rich body of literature that links various spatial and contextual factors to variations in natives’ attitudes towards outgroups, such as religious minorities, ethnic minorities and immigrants (Hopkins et al., 2016). Initially devised to explain racial relations in Western democracies, two schools of thought have come to dominate this line of research and explain the development of native attitudes towards immigrants. The first is characterized by determinants
derived from economic self-interest and relies heavily on literature from trade and labor economics (Baarda, 2016; Barceló, 2016; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014; Malhotra et al., 2013; O’Rourke and Sinnot, 2006). Such concerns may include labor market competition – such as competition over jobs or wage suppression (Malhotra et al., 2013) – as well as the possible impacts of immigration on domestic fiscal policy and taxes (Hanson et al., 2007).
The second school of thought focuses on the role of sociotropic factors. This approach relies more readily on psychological and sociological arguments and contends that cultural and social influences play the primary role in determining natives’ attitudes towards immigrants (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). In general, this body of research contradicts much of the work on economic self-interest. For example, an individual’s personal economic situation may not be as influential as other, group-level factors, such as concerns about the economy or the tax system as common national issues (Citrin et al., 1990; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). Other scholars focus on the symbolic threats of immigration, such as its impact on language, culture, social norms and national identity. Chandler and Tsai (2001), as well as Sniderman et al. (2004) argue that a perceived cultural threat – for example, from not using the receiving country’s ‘official’ language – has a more significant impact on anti-immigrant attitudes than economic concerns. Lastly, natives have been shown to develop greater anti-immigrant sentiment in places where immigrant populations are growing and in times when immigration is a salient national issue (Hopkins, 2010).
2.3 Immigrant Perceptions of Discrimination
At this point, a key question relates to how immigrants react to these varying political and social contexts. Despite the large body of literature on native perceptions of immigrants, relatively little is known about the perspectives of immigrants with regards to their treatment at the hands of native citizens. For reasons discussed above, better understanding immigrants’ perspectives has important implications for immigrants’ social, political and cultural incorporation into their new society.
Led by sociologists and psychologists, the bulk of prior research on PD has focused on the effects of high PD on the mental and physical wellbeing of minority group members, including immigrants (Vargas et al., 2017). For example, believing oneself to be discriminated against is associated with intense feelings of anger, fear, anxiety and depression (Ibid). While these feelings alone are detrimental to an individual’s wellbeing, they can also worsen pre-existing health conditions, such as high blood pressure or diabetes, or lead to higher levels of body fat and blood sugar levels (Ibid). Scholars have attributed higher rates of obesity and higher
instances of on-the-job injuries among Latino immigrant farmers to higher PD (Borre et al., 2010). Troublingly, the aforementioned impacts of high PD have been found to be especially severe amongst immigrant children, particularly children of undocumented immigrants (Vargas et al., 2017). High PD has also been shown to negatively influence an immigrant’s willingness to seek medical attention, regardless of their immigration status (Pedraza et al., 2017; Vargas et al., 2017).
Meanwhile, research in political science has focused on the impact of PD on the political behavior of minority groups. To date, previous research has shown that PD influences a litany of political outcomes among minorities and outgroups (Lavariega et al., 2010), such as an increase in the adoption of group-centric political attitudes (Hopkins et al., 2016) and changes in political participation and trust in government (Schildkraut, 2011). High PD has also been explored as the cause of group consciousness and ethnic identity, coalition formation, minority group opinion, as well as feelings of national identity (Hopkins et al., 2016). Lastly, scholars have observed a discrepancy between perceptions of discrimination targeting groups as a whole and perceptions of discrimination targeting people as individuals. The orientation towards group-centric identities caused by PD is tied to minority group members perceiving higher PD directed against their group as a whole than at them as individual members of the group. (Dion, 2001).
Here, an important gap in the immigration literature begins to emerge. Despite the growing body of literature on the effects of PD on immigrant groups, less is known about its determinants. There is general consensus that non-Caucasian immigrants in predominantly Caucasian receiving countries perceive greater discrimination than Caucasian immigrants, as do immigrants that self-identify with ‘visible’ minorities (Dietz, 2010). From the theoretical perspective, relative deprivation theory attributes perceptions of discrimination to the group with whom an individual compares their personal or group situation (Banerjee, 2008). In similar fashion, social identity theory links PD with the comparison group, although it emphasizes that the comparison group is chosen based on the most ‘salient demographic or social characteristics in a given context’ (Tajfel and Turner, cited in Banerjee, 2008: 384). Prior research also suggests that individual-level factors such as an individual’s acculturation strategy (Berry, 1997), age, linguistic preference or length of time in the receiving country (Hopkins et al., 2016) may also influence the degree to which individuals perceive discrimination.
Meanwhile, intergroup threat theory predicts that when individuals self-categorize as members of social groups and feel threatened in their status relations with groups to which they do not belong (outgroups), intergroup conflict and prejudice may develop (Ybarra et al., 2016;
Pedraza et al., 2017). This would lead to the expectation that immigrants would generally harbor negative appraisals of their intergroup relations with local majorities, thus increasing the likelihood that they frame negative interpersonal encounters as discriminatory treatment. Notably, Hopkins et al. (2016) found little evidence to support the intergroup threat theory in their study of geographic clustering in immigrant PD in the United States. In this study, no spatial patterning was identified in immigrant PD, suggesting that immigrants that that live in close proximity to natives with strong anti-immigrant attitudes are no more likely to report higher instances of perceived discrimination than immigrants living in proximity to natives with strong pro-immigrant attitudes.
Despite these findings, little is know about how broader contextual factors influence individual PD. Here, this study seeks to fill a gap in literature related to immigration and immigrant perceptions of discrimination by looking at high-level contextual factors that shape the political and social climate in which U.S. immigrants find themselves today. Specifically, this research examines how immigration’s salience in political and social discourse influences immigrant perceptions of discrimination. Immigration’s salience is conceptualized as a phenomenon shaped by both spatial and temporal factors, namely immigration-related legislative policies and trends in media coverage, respectively. The contribution to prior research is therefore twofold. First, as an empirical matter, the study will contribute to our understanding of the contemporary immigration debate in the United States by constructing a picture of trends related to legislation and media coverage related to immigration. It will also offer a clear accounting how Hispanic immigrant perceptions of discrimination have changed since the turn of the century. Second, by analyzing these factors in tandem, this study assesses how changes in immigration’s salience across space and time influence possible variations in immigrant PD.
Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework
In the following chapter, I argue that the salience of immigration as a political and social issue can influence immigrant perceptions of discrimination, with a particular focus on Hispanic immigrants in the United States. The chapter begins with an overview of my theoretical framework, with a particular emphasis on the mechanism by which the salience of immigration can alter conceptions of social and ethnic identity in manner that ultimately influences individual perceptions of discrimination. Sections 3.2 and 3.3 focus specifically on empirical trends and theoretical expectations related to state-level immigration policymaking and mass media
coverage, which I deploy as the primary expressions of immigration’s salience. The chapter also includes an overview of my expected findings and hypotheses.
3.1 Issue Salience, Identity and Perceptions of Discrimination
In this study, ‘immigration’ is defined as ‘salient’ when it is deemed as an important or prominent issue in political and societal discourse (Wlezien, 2005). However, there are a number of mechanisms through which immigration may become salient. One common measure is public opinion (Ibid). In this respect, public opinion polls conducted since 2000 indicate that immigration is a frequently salient issue for Hispanic immigrants in the United States. Non-Hispanic Americans polled by organizations such as Gallup.com or the Pew Center infrequently mention ‘immigration’ as the ‘most important’ issue facing the United States (Gallup, 2013; Pew Hispanic Center, 2015). By contrast, at six different points between 2004 and 2012, the Pew Hispanic Center observed a minimum of 27 percent of U.S. Hispanics citing immigration as the top issue, with peaks of 37 percent in 2007 and 34 percent in 2012. This suggests that Hispanic immigrants are primed to see immigration as a salient issue.
However, public opinion is not the only measure of immigration’s salience. An issue may become salient if it becomes the subject of political debate, which in turn prompts individual citizens to pay more attention to politicians’ behavior and to the way in which the issue is presented in the news media (Wlezien, 2005). This mechanism for the development of immigration as a salient issue holds true in the case of the United States. Immigration-related policy making at the state level has increased dramatically since the early 2000s, with the lion’s share of this activity characterized as anti-immigrant (Rivera, 2016; Vargas et al., 2017). This activity was and continues to be widely covered by mass media (Hopkins, 2010). Mass media coverage not only helps to shape public opinion on immigration-related issues, but it proliferates stories that may influence immigrants’ perceptions of the overall social climate in which they live. In this respect, changes in legislative activity and mass media coverage can produce substantial spatial and temporal variations in immigration’s salience for immigrants. How then does the salience of immigration influence individual perceptions of discrimination?
Perceiving discrimination requires noticing unfair treatment directed against oneself and associating that discrimination to one’s membership in a group (Major, Quinton and McCoy, 2002). With this in mind, both an individual’s sense of fairness and their sense of group membership are important. Here, social identity theory provides a useful framework for understanding how the salience of immigration can influence both of these attributes and in turn individuals’ perceptions of discrimination. Social identity theory maintains that individuals are
motivated to develop and maintain social identities, including ethnic identities, that are positive but that clearly set their group (the ‘ingroup’) apart from other groups (the ‘outgroup’) (Tafjel and Turner, 1986). Individuals who identify strongly with a their ingroup tend to incorporate characteristics of that group into their self concept, which in turn influences their perceptions of their environment (Operario and Fiske, 2001). Moreover, individuals that strongly identify with their ingroup often demonstrate heightened awareness of information related to their group (Ibid). Threatening social and political contexts can play a key role in the development of social identity (Cropper, 2012). For Hispanic immigrants in the United States, prior research suggests that the ‘Hispanic ethnic identity is a ‘situational ethnic identity’ and that particular features of the social and political environment determine when and where individuals identify as Hispanics rather than their nationally-based origin group (Cropper, 2012: 82)’. Critically, previous studies have shown that immigrant groups are highly sensitive to threatening political and social climates (Perez, 2015) and that such environments also increase the salience of ethnic identity within these groups (Rumbaut, 1997; Jimenez, 2010; Perez, 2015). Empirical evidence suggests that Hispanics in the United States are no exception, with Cropper (2012) finding that news media and political action about immigration prompts Hispanics to coalesce with other Hispanics, thereby increasing the salience of their collective identity. Leveraging social identity theory, it is reasonable to expect that as individuals coalesce around their ethnic identity that they also demonstrate a heightened sensitivity to perceiving discrimination (Ibid). Moreover, prior research suggests there is a feedback loop between ethnic identity and discrimination; experiences of discrimination have also been shown to strengthen ethnic identity, suggesting that these processes operate in a cyclical manner, mutually reinforcing each other’s likelihood over time (Dion and Earn, 1975).
Collectively, the resulting expectation is that an increase in immigration’s salience will result in higher levels of PD amongst Hispanic immigrants. However, this is based on two important assumptions. First, I assume that when the salience of immigration is high, the social and political climate for Hispanic immigrants is generally negative or threatening in nature. This assumption will be tested in the following sections, which explores the two measures of immigration’s salience that I deploy throughout the course of this study: immigration-related policymaking at the state level and mass media coverage of immigration-related stories. Together, these two of measures of immigration’s salience reinforce the conclusion of Vargas et al. (2017: 478) that ‘the increased enforcement of federal immigration laws by state and local officials and the denial of public services (particularly health services), coupled with ideologically charged
immigrant rhetoric at the social and political levels, have joined to foster a hostile anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic environment’.
Second, it is important to reemphasize that the salience of an issue is determined by the extent to which members of society deem that issue ‘important’; therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that issues become salient to individuals at different points in time and for a myriad of reasons. This means that individual Hispanic immigrants will inevitably vary in the degree to which they identify immigration as a salient issue in their everyday lives. The resulting expectation would be that individuals’ perceptions of discrimination would be impacted by immigration’s salience in different ways. However, I argue that the breadth and intensity of the immigration debate in the United States produces some level of commonality amongst all Hispanic immigrants in terms of how it influences their perceptions of the environment around them and their interpersonal encounters. In the following sections, I elaborate on two defining characteristics of immigration as a salient social and political issue: state-level immigration policymaking and media coverage of immigration-related stories.
3.2 Immigration’s Legislative Salience
One undeniable feature of immigration’s contemporary salience is the degree to which state legislatures have taken a leading role in immigration policy making. Indeed, in the mid to late 2000s, hundreds of local and state governments in the United States enacted policy responses to immigration, including both exclusionary and inclusive measures (Hopkins et al., 2016). To understand the theoretical expectation that immigration’s legislative salience will influence immigrant PD, it is first necessary to explore the genesis and nature of this legislative activity.
Much of the immigration policymaking undertaken by states in recent years can be traced to several immigration policies produced during the mid-1990s. For example, Proposition 187 – passed by California’s legislature in 1994 – was arguably the ‘progenitor of all contemporary grassroots local and state anti-immigrant legislation (Varsanyi, 2008: 888)’. In a controversial move, Proposition 187 established a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibited undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other public services (Ibid). Meanwhile, two federal policies passed in 1996 helped to set the stage for states to take a more active role in immigration policy making and enforcement more generally. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) offered states greater flexibility to exclude certain immigrants from federal benefits such as Medicaid, while the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of (IIRIRA) offered similar
flexibility in deciding whether to commit state and local police to the enforcement of civil immigration law (Ybarra et al., 2016).
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, states began to leverage PRWORA and IIRIRA with greater regularity while generally taking a more active role in forging policies targeting immigrant populations (Ibid). The dramatic growth of immigrant populations during this time period also helped to fuel the boom in state-level immigration policies. Between 2000 and 2010, the combined Hispanic and Asian population grew more than 43%, making up almost of a quarter of the total U.S. population in 2010 (Ibid). In particular, between 2006 and 2007, the United States experienced a surge in the arrival of undocumented immigrants along its southern borders (Department of Homeland Security, 2007). This development, coupled with the failure of the federal government to implement meaningful immigration reform, was in part responsible for the acceleration of state immigration policymaking that was subsequently observed between 2006 and present day. This legislation took a variety of forms, although the bulk of academic literature has focused on anti-immigrant policies (Rivera, 2016).
In recent years, a number of state immigration policies have generated national attention due to their highly restrictive or punitive nature. For example, in 2011, the Alabama state legislature adopted what is considered to be one of the harshest anti-immigrant bills in the country. The Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, otherwise known as Alabama HB 56, targeted immigrants in almost every facet of life:
Among other things, Alabama’s HB (House Bill) 56 requires police officers in the state to ascertain the immigration status of people stopped, detained, or arrested and prohibits undocumented immigrants from receiving any public benefits at the state or local level, bar undocumented immigrant students from attending public institutions of higher education, and require public elementary or secondary school officials to ascertain whether students are undocumented (Ybarra et al., 2016: 315).
HB 56 also greatly expanded the number of immigration-related crimes, ‘with draconian penalties attached (ACLU, 2012)’. For example, Section 11 of the bill made it illegal for undocumented immigrants to ‘knowingly apply for work, solicit work,’ or ‘perform work,’ while Section 13 greatly limited housing options by making it a crime for anyone to enter into a rental agreement with an undocumented immigrant (Ibid). Although ultimately less extreme in nature, Arizona’s ‘Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act’ (SB 1070) generated even more controversy when it was adopted in April 2010. The bill included new penalties relating to immigration law enforcement including trespassing, harboring and transporting undocumented
immigrants, alien registration documents, employer sanctions, and human smuggling (NCSL. 2010). Both bills were heavily criticized for unfairly targeting Hispanic individuals and creating a culture of fear among immigrant communities (Ybarra et al., 2016).
Theories tied to ‘realistic conflict’ such ‘intergroup threat’ would posit that such policies are an attempt by native citizens to protect their status in society and protect their share of societal and political resources from infringement by outgroups (Ibid). With this in mind, anti-immigrant policies can be viewed as an attempt by natives to preserve their status amidst threats from immigrants for shared resources or political power (Pedraza et al., 2017). Therefore, within such a climate, immigrants would not only view anti-immigrant policies as hostile and threatening to their status, they would also face genuine prejudice from majority group members. This would lead to the expectation that immigrants would generally harbor negative appraisals of their intergroup relations with local majorities, thus increasing the likelihood that they frame negative interpersonal encounters as discriminatory treatment (Hopkins, 2010).
Social identity theory would posit that immigration legislation is powerful because it reinforces the degree to which individuals incorporate group membership into their identity (Perez, 2015). By classifying and codifying individuals into groups – such as citizens, residents, legal aliens, or illegal aliens, etc. – immigration legislation encourages individuals to more readily identify with members of their own ingroup; it can also teach members of those groups that government is more favorable to some groups than others (Gee and Ford, 2011). Here, the policy feedback theory provides a useful framework for illustrating how such policies can influence perceptions of discrimination through ‘resource’ and ‘interpretive effects’ (Pedraza et al., 2017). A key component of public policy making is deciding who is eligible to receive government resources and public benefits and who pays the costs. These decisions produce ‘interpretive’ effects caused by the codification and classification of individuals into different groups that determine to what extent they are eligible to receive public benefits (Ibid). In immigration policymaking, this often manifests itself in the form of provisions that condition program eligibility for public benefits on nativity or various citizenship criterion (Gee and Ford, 2011). Inclusive immigration laws that offer loose eligibility requirements may teach immigrants that government is responsive to their needs and empower individuals to engage in civic life (Pedraza et al., 2017: 201). On the other hand, restrictive immigration laws that limit the provision of public benefits based on citizenship or residential status communicate to members of those groups that government is not sensitive to their needs and that they are second-class members of society (Ibid).
Policies designed to more strictly enforce immigration laws – such as Arizona’s SB 1070 or Alabama’s HB 56 – also encourage group orientation and may perpetuate feelings of being unfairly treated amongst immigrant groups. Punitive laws such as these, and other ‘show me your papers’ laws disproportionately target minorities (Pedraza et al., 2017: 7), while policies encouraging increased deportation of undocumented immigrants has been shown to increase feelings of fear and ‘being hunted’ among Hispanics in the United States, regardless of their immigration status (Vargas et al., 2017: 462). Such laws have also been shown to increase distrust in government among both U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanics (Rocha et al., 2015). Clearly, the risk here is that such policies ‘reinforce definitions of national belonging that conflate citizenship status and ethnicity, which then transfers stigma associated with unauthorized immigration to entire groups of people, regardless of their citizenship status (Pedraza et al., 2017: 3)’. This corroborates an oft-cited narrative by immigrant advocates that anti-immigrant polices push Hispanics to withdraw from full engagement in public life (National Council of La Raza, 2014). It also reinforces the previously articulated argument that anti-immigrant political contexts prompt Hispanics to coalesce around their ethnic identity, regardless of their national origin or immigration status.
However, are immigrant communities aware of the legislative policies that affect them? Prior research has shown that they are, and that such legislation does not go unnoticed by heavily immigrant communities. For example, not only are Hispanics in the United States highly aware of immigration-related legislation, they also tend to perceive such legislation as generally anti-immigrant in nature (Vargas et al., 2017). This has broad implications for the psychological wellbeing of members of these communities, regardless of their immigration status. For example, a poll conducted by Latino Decisions (2016) found that the majority of Hispanic citizens have personal relationships with undocumented immigrants. As such, ‘even though Latino citizens may not be directly harmed by punitive immigration policies, they recognize that friends and family members are going to be directly impacted’, write Vargas et al. (2017: 474). ‘Furthermore, it is plausible that Latino citizens may be concerned that, regardless of their personal immigration status, they could be impacted by punitive laws if they happen to look like an immigrant (Ibid).’ This sense of 'fear by association’ has been linked to a sense of ‘linked fate’ amongst Hispanics in the United States, which I theorize may contribute to a shared sense of pervasive discrimination. The resulting expectation is described below in Hypothesis One.
Hypothesis 1: Hispanic immigrant perceptions of discrimination will be higher in places where
3.3 Immigration’s Media Salience
Mass media is also a powerful measure of the contemporary salience of political and social issues (Wlezien, 2005). The issue of immigration is no exception; on the contrary, mass media coverage plays a crucial role in establishing immigration as an important societal issue and amplifying its salience among native citizens and immigrants alike (Beyer and Matthes, 2015). For example, consider the role of mass media coverage in the wake of then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants. In a widely publicized speech in June, 2015, Mr. Trump said: ‘When Mexico sends it people, they're not sending their best…They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us [sic]. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.’Or consider the dramatic response to news footage showing a Hungarian news camerawoman kicking and tripping refugees along the Serbian/Hungarian border in September, 2015. Both incidents generated global news attention and added a sense of violent conflict to an already vitriolic debate about immigration taking place on both continents.
Research in symbolic politics has shown that mass media can play a crucial role in politicizing individuals’ day-to-day encounters and shaping individual attitudes towards immigration and immigrants, specifically (Kinder, 1998; Hopkins, 2010). For example, Hopkins (2010) found that increased coverage of immigration-related stories by mass media has a correlation with anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens. Following this line of reasoning, such coverage would also inform immigrants about local and national attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. These attitudes may be positive or negative, but previous research has shown that media coverage of immigration tends to focus on negative aspects of immigration and immigrants (Hopkins, 2010; Brader et al., 2008). 1 Negative portrayal of immigrants by media may thus encourage the framing of immigrant’s personal experiences of negative contact with majority citizens as perceived discrimination at the local, intergroup level (Hopkins, 2010). The increased coverage of anti-immigrant legislation by news media will also broaden awareness among immigrants of new policies that may influence them or someone in their personal network. Mass media therefore not only helps to frame immigrants’ personal encounters, but also frame their understanding of the government’s attitude towards them and the group with whom they identify.
1 As part of my research design, I tested this assumption by conducting an analysis of 200 randomly selected news stories from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and LexisNexis that featured the keywords ‘immigration’ or ‘immigrant’. This resulted in the finding that 63% of those stories focused on negative appraisals of immigrants specifically, or immigration policy more generally.
Media also acts as the primary purveyor of elite discourse related to immigration. Prior research by Cropper (2012: 51) finds that the way in which elites frame immigration is critical to the development of a collective Hispanic identity:
‘For group-based mobilization to occur, Latinos must perceive a sense of solidarity and unity within their own economic and political experiences. Elite framing is critical to the mobilization of collective identities. Successful frames not only identify the ‘injustice’ or ‘benefit’ of a policy or position to a particular social group, but they identify the identities of the contenders, distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’’.
From another perceptive, mass media can influence the salience of ethnic identity for Hispanics through explicit and implicit pan-ethnic cues (Brader et al., 2008; Cropper, 2012). Pan-ethnic cues are messages within the immigration debate that use words such as ‘Latino’ or ‘Hipsanic’ to express anti-immigrant sentiment or make derogatory or stereotypical statements about Hispanics in the United States. Images of individuals of Hispanic origin may also serve as explicit cues by mass media. Implicit cues are similar, although they replace direct references to ‘Latinos’ or ‘Hispanics’ with more subtle references, such as ‘low-skilled immigrants’, a phrase which is commonly used to implicitly refer to Hispanic immigrants (Cropper, 2012: 52; Brader et al., 2008). Given the shared experiences of immigration and racialization in the United States, most research shows that these cues resonate across all Hispanic national origin groups, particularly when used to convey anti-immigrant messages or contexts (Barreto 2007; Cropper, 2012). This can serve to mobilize Hispanics to more readily identify with their ethnic group.
Further, a 2008 report by the Brookings Institute concluded that media coverage of Hispanics in the United States focuses almost exclusively on undocumented immigrants and immigration, lacks important context, and often frames immigration as a crisis (Akdenizli et al., 2008). Given the findings of Vargas et al. (2017) that most Hispanics have personal relationships of some kind with undocumented immigrants, media messaging that targets undocumented immigration is likely to resonate across all Hispanic groups. The racialization of the immigration debate, which is reinforced by explicit and implicit media cues, also transfers the stigmatization of unauthorized immigration to entire groups of people, regardless of their citizenship status (Cropper, 2012). This can contribute to a sense of linked fate among all Hispanics in the United States – one that reinforces the salience of ethnic identity in these individuals’ social identities. The resulting expectation is described below in Hypothesis Two.
Hypothesis 2: Hispanic immigrant perceptions of discrimination will be higher when
immigration is a salient issue in the national news media.
Chapter 4 Research Design
To test the influence of immigration’s salience on immigrant perceptions of discrimination, a quantitative analysis was conducted utilizing survey data related to Hispanic immigrant PD in the United States. The following chapter begins with a synopsis of this project’s case selection strategy and a brief overview of the characteristics of the Hispanic immigrant population in the United States. This is followed by an in-depth look at the primary variables of interest in this study, including a detailed overview of the construction of the study’s two independent variables. The chapter concludes with a description of this study’s primary control variables.
4.1 Case Selection
Recent changes in the immigrant population of the United States make it a compelling choice for an investigation of perceptions of discrimination among immigrants. The foreign-born population skyrocketed between 1970 and present, while also experiencing a profound shift in its demographic makeup. In 1960, 84 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population was from Canada or Europe; by 2013, individuals from these regions comprised only 14 percent this population (Pew Hispanic Center, 2015). During this same period, the share of immigrants from Southeast Asia, Mexico, other Latin American countries, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East increased dramatically. In 2013, individuals born in Mexico, China and India comprised the three largest immigrant groups in the United States (Ibid). As a consequence of these changes, the contemporary immigrant population of the United States comes from a highly diverse collection of ethnic, national and cultural backgrounds.
As the largest U.S. ethnic group, Hispanics have been the focus of immigration discourse across two decades (Brader, Valentino and Jardina, 2013), with much of this discourse focusing on illegal immigration (Perez, 2015). For two reasons discussed below, Hispanic immigrants represent an important case for further investigation into the determinants of perceived discrimination. First, in terms of sheer numbers, Hispanics have emerged as the largest minority group in the United States, comprising 18 percent of the U.S. population, or 57 million people, in 2015 (Pew Research Center, 2016). Moreover, this trend is projected to increase in the coming decades, with the Pew Hispanic Center (2015) estimating that the Hispanic population will reach
106 million people or 24 percent of the U.S. population by 2065. Within the context, better understanding the socioeconomic and psychological wellbeing of these individuals takes on added importance, as it will offer clues to how patterns of ethnic inequality will evolve in the United States in the coming decades. At the same time, the Hispanic American experience remains closely tied to the immigrant experience: 52 percent of Hispanic adults are immigrants, and 85% of all Hispanics have at least one immigrant grandparent (Pedraza et al., 2017).
Second, Hispanic immigrants are no longer confined to settlement in traditional gateway locations such as New York, California or Florida. Hispanic immigrants are increasingly settling in new destinations – in smaller cities and towns in places like Iowa, Arkansas or Virginia. As Tran and Valdez (2015: 156) explain, ‘this profound shift is both an unintended consequence of stricter border control policies that occurred in the 1990s and a direct result of demographic changes and economic restructuring in these new destinations’. This development comes with tangible consequences for natives and immigrants alike. Prior research has already demonstrated that immigrants tend to face a more negative social and political reception from natives in new destinations because they lack familiarity with immigration (Marrow, 2013) and because they possess fewer institutions to facilitate the incorporation of immigrant families (Ibid). Clearly, assimilation is no longer just a regional issue to be experienced by a select number of states; it is increasingly an issue of national relevance.
Other immigrant groups would also facilitate compelling examinations of immigration’s salience and immigrant perceptions of discrimination. For example, the Asian American population of the United States is the fastest-growing of all immigrant groups, with the majority of these individuals coming from China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea and Japan (Pew Research Center, 2016). In 2016, the Pew Center reported that there were approximately 11.6 million immigrants from South and East Asia residing in the United States, representing nearly 30% of the country’s immigrant population. However, the immigration debate has generally not focused on immigrants from Asia, focusing instead on undocumented immigrants more closely associated with individuals of Hispanic descent. This makes it less likely that a relationship between Asian immigrant perceptions of discrimination and immigration’s salience would be observed in an analysis of these variables.
On the other hand, immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Western Asia have recently gained more attention in the immigration debate. These immigrants also include refugees from the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As of 2015, the Pew Center calculates that there are approximately 1.7 million immigrants from
these regions residing in the United States, representing four percent of the nation’s 43 million immigrants. Despite their proportionally small representation among immigrants, these immigrant groups have become highly salient in the immigration debate amidst concerns related to terrorism and national security. Most notably, immigrants and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations were banned from entry into the United States under President Donald Trump’s Executive Orders 13769 and 13780 (Office of the Press Secretary, 2017). This included individuals from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, although the latter was subsequently removed under Executive Order 13780 (Ibid). While these developments would make Muslim American immigrants an interesting choice for an investigation of immigration’s salience and immigrant PD, there is a general lack of data related to PD among this population (Rivera, 2017).
4.2 Data and Methods
This section illustrates how the primary variables of interest were operationalized. Broadly speaking, two variables were of primary interest in this investigation. The dependent variable is perceptions of discrimination (PD) amongst Hispanic immigrants in the United States. The independent variable is the salience of immigration in political and social discourse; it is operationalized using two independent measurements: immigration’s legislative salience (state-level immigration legislation) and immigration’s media salience (mass media coverage). The following section begins with a discussion of the dependent variable, followed by an overview of the two measurements of immigration’s salience. It concludes with a brief discussion of key control variables considered during the course of this research.
4.2.1 Dependent Variable: Hispanic Immigrant PD
Two different datasets were used to measure perceptions of discrimination among Hispanic immigrants. The first comprised of data from five surveys conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center between 2002 and 2010. This data comprised the sole measurement of Hispanic immigrant PD in my analysis of immigration’s media salience and immigrant PD. For practical reasons discussed later in this section, a separate dataset was used to analyze the relationship between immigration’s legislative salience and immigrant PD.
The decision to leverage the Pew surveys for my analysis of immigration’s media salience was based on several factors. First, the surveys share common sampling methodologies, which allowed for the datasets to be merged and analyzed in aggregate. Each of the surveys was conducted by the independent research firm International Communications Research, who executed the interviews via telephone with options for respondents to complete the survey in
Spanish or English. For each survey, the sampling methodology targeted a statistically representative sample of Latinos in target regions of high Hispanic concentration, which allowed the results to be examined nationally. Second, each survey consisted of large samples of Hispanic immigrants. The sample sizes ranged from a minimum of 1,375 Hispanic adults in 2010 to a maximum of 2,929 in 2002. The mean sample size was 2,118 respondents. In total, the surveys included data collected from 10,592 respondents, 63% of whom self identified as immigrants. My analysis focused exclusively on perceptions of discrimination amongst respondents who identified themselves as immigrants. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the five surveys were executed across the better part of a decade: in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2010. This meant that temporal variations in immigrant PD and immigration’s media salience could reasonably be expected. Indeed, as the following chapter will illustrate, both variables fluctuated substantially over time, meaning that variations in immigrant PD could be analyzed in concert with immigration’s media salience to identify a possible relationship.
Limitations in the available data often force scholars of perceptions of discrimination to choose between measures that emphasize perceptions of discrimination directed against groups as a whole (group-level PD) and measures that emphasize discrimination that directly targets individuals (individual-level PD) (Hopkins et al., 2016). In an ideal setting, the Pew surveys leveraged for this research would include a battery of questions that assess both individual and group-level PD; however, only the 2004 Pew survey included questions related to individual-level PD. As a consequence, the analysis of immigration’s media salience focused exclusively on its influence on perceptions of discrimination directed against Hispanic immigrants as a group. To measure group-level PD among the five Pew surveys, I analyzed respondent answers to the following question: ‘In general, do you think discrimination against Hispanics is a major problem, minor problem, or not a problem in preventing Hispanics in general from succeeding in America?’ Respondents could also choose to refuse the question or indicate that they ‘did not know’.
Ideally, the Pew data would contain the respondents’ residential data, such as their state of residence. This would allow for a comprehensive analysis of immigration’s legislative salience to be conducted in tandem with immigration’s media salience. However, a key limitation of the Pew surveys was that only two of the surveys contained state level residential data: the 2002 and the 2004 surveys. To complicate matters further, both of these surveys were conducted during periods of exceptionally low and nearly identical levels of media and legislative salience. This was particularly true in terms of immigration’s legislative salience; in fact, in 2002 and 2004,
almost no state-level immigration legislation was enacted. This meant that neither survey could be utilized in an analysis of immigration’s legislative salience because they lacked meaningful variation. As a consequence of these challenges, a separate dataset was required to evaluate a possible relationship between immigration’s legislative salience and immigrant PD. Here, I turned to the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Surveys (ANES). The 2012 and 2016 ANES are time series survey validations of a nationally representative sample of registered voters. The two datasets contained samples of 350 and 452 Hispanic immigrants, respectively. Unlike the 2002 and 2004 Pew surveys, the ANES surveys were conducted during periods of time in which immigration was a salient political issue. This meant that variations in immigration’s legislative salience could not only be observed, but also analyzed in relationship to immigrant perceptions of discrimination.
As highlighted earlier, the study of PD often necessitates a choice between investigations of group-level or individual-level PD. One advantage of leveraging the ANES datasets was that they capture respondents’ views on both types of PD. Individual discrimination was measured in the ANES surveys using the question: ‘How much discrimination have you personally faced because of your ethnicity or race?’ Respondents had the option to select one of five responses: 1) a great deal, 2) a lot, 3) a moderate amount, 4) a little, or 5) none at all. The respondents’ views on discrimination directed against Hispanics as a group was captured using the question: ‘How much discrimination is there in the United States today against Hispanics?’ Respondents could answer with one of five responses: 1) a great deal, 2) a lot, 3) a moderate amount, 4) a little, or 5) none at all.
4.2.2 Independent Variable: Immigration’s Media Salience
To test my argument that immigration’s salience can influence immigrant perceptions of discrimination, two distinct measurements of immigration’s salience were used. The first measured immigration’s salience in the media by focusing on the coverage of immigration-related stories by mass media. This approach mirrors Hopkins (2010) ‘politicized places’ methodology for measuring the salience of immigration amongst native citizens.
Immigration’s media salience was measured by calculating the number of news stories related to immigration produced on a monthly basis by major news outlets. This was an original database constructed specifically for this research and that leveraged the resources of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA) and the LexisNexis Academic database. Founded in 1968, the VTNA maintains a searchable online library of televised news network programs and
