Political Behavior

, Volume 38, Issue 1, pp 229–253 | Cite as

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and ‘socio-psychological’ sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: “attribute-based” judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants’ desirability based on individual characteristics—human capital, race, language ability, and so on—and “categorical” judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries’ individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants’ attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.

Keywords

Immigration Public opinion United States Conjoint Illegal immigration Path to citizenship 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all of those who provided constructive feedback on this manuscript over the course of its development. This includes anonymous reviewers, individual readers too numerous to list, participants at two rounds of the Comparative Approaches to Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion workshop (at MIT in 2013 and Stanford in 2014), and those who attended presentations at the annual meetings of the MPSA in 2013 and 2014. We take full responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment.

Supplementary material

11109_2015_9311_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (457 kb)
Supplementary material 1 (PDF 457 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.American UniversityWashingtonUSA
  2. 2.University of Southern CaliforniaLos AngelesUSA
  3. 3.University of California, BerkeleyBerkeleyUSA

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