Foreign-Born Population Growth, Negative Outgroup Contact, and Americans’ Attitudes Towards Legal and Unauthorized Immigration

Individual attitudes towards immigration are powerfully driven by ethnic context, that is, size of foreign-born population. We advance the literature by examining how the change (growth) in foreign-born population, in addition to its size (level), is related to two distinct outcomes: natives’ views on legal and unauthorized immigration. By analysing a probability US sample, we find that an increase in the state-level immigration population is positively related to Americans’ approval of a policy aimed at containing the flow of undocumented immigrants. The proportion of immigrants in a state, however, is not a significant predictor of support for such restrictive policy. With respect to legal immigration, neither the amount of recent change in, nor the size of, the immigration population matters. Our study provides strong evidence for contextual effects: net of compositional factors, a dynamic change in foreign-born population has an independent impact on how Americans view unauthorized, but not legal, immigration.

Unauthorized Immigration

Although immigration covers a wide sociopolitical spectrum, this chapter’s focus will be on the unauthorized (“illegal”) and how state violence unfolds for them. This state violence is generally focused on Brown people, and increasingly children—there are approximately 23,000 unaccompanied children. It is sad witnessing the full-scale assault on this group (those seeking asylum or entering with a desire to return) who originate in countries not held in high esteem by the state. There are many such countries, stretching across many continents and hemispheres, but the emphasis is on Central America. This chapter examines how state-sanctioned violence targets the unauthorized and undermines their communities across the country.