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Race, Religion, and Immigration Policy Attitudes

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Abstract

Using the pooled 2004 and 2008 National Politics Study, the present study indicates that while blacks are more likely than whites and Hispanics to hear political sermons, hearing such sermons more consistently associates with support for less restrictive immigration policies among whites than among both blacks and Hispanics. This may suggests that attending congregations where politics are heard provides whites with unique opportunities to think about their government’s obligation to immigrants. Alternatively, Hispanics may, by virtue of experiencing a direct or indirect immigration experience, be more supportive of liberal immigration policies regardless of the sermon they hear. Finally, we argue that the marginalized economic position of blacks may help explain why exposure to political sermons is largely unrelated to black immigration policy attitudes.

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Notes

  1. While this is a unique sample aimed at gathering a national sample of Blacks, weights were constructed to approximate the social–demographic characteristics (e.g., region, income, gender, education) of each racial/ethnic group included in the study as reported in the 2000 Census.

  2. This index has a 0.678 alpha score for Whites, a 0.660 alpha score for Blacks, and a 0.649 alpha score for Hispanic Americans.

  3. Missing values for age, income, and political ideology are replaced by the Imputation by Chained Equations multiple imputation method on Stata 13. The imputed variables do not substantively or significantly change the outcomes of these analyses.

  4. Although there is an association between secular and attending political congregations, with a VIF of 1, it does not reach the 5.0 threshold that would raise concerns about multi-collinearity.

  5. While not displayed, we ran a series of regression of equality tests to compare the coefficient effect size between exposure to political sermons (e.g. hearing two to three political sermons vs. hearing zero to one sermons) and religious faith (e.g. non-Evangelical vs. Evangelical) with immigration policy attitudes among Whites. This test indicates that in roughly one-third of cases analyzed, the association between exposure to political sermons and immigration policy attitudes was significantly stronger than the association between religious faith and immigration policy attitudes. These analyses as are the standardized coefficients for these analyses are available upon request.

  6. See, StataCorp. 2013. Stata treatment-effects Reference manual: potential outcomes/counterfactual outcomes: Release 13. College Station, TX. Stata Press.

  7. While not displayed, the treatment effect analyses, which are available upon request, between religion and immigration attitudes among Blacks, Hispanics, and the race * political sermon interactions are consistent with our logit regression findings presented in Tables 2, 3, and 4.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

    R. Khari Brown

  2. Department of Political Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

    Ronald E. Brown

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Correspondence to R. Khari Brown.

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Brown, R.K., Brown, R.E. Race, Religion, and Immigration Policy Attitudes. Race Soc Probl 9, 4–18 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-017-9201-5

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