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Legislation, Linguistics, and Location: Exploring Attitudes on Unauthorized Immigration

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  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

    David A. Caicedo

  2. Department of Psychology, New York University, Meyer Hall, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Vivienne Badaan

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  1. David A. Caicedo
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  2. Vivienne Badaan
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Correspondence to David A. Caicedo.

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All materials and procedures performed in studies involving human participants, including collection of informed consent, were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board of the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (475901-2) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Caicedo, D.A., Badaan, V. Legislation, Linguistics, and Location: Exploring Attitudes on Unauthorized Immigration. Int. Migration & Integration 22, 967–985 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-020-00780-3

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