Here’s a neat new piece in Social Science Quarterly by Richard Hanania. The set-up:
I conducted a preregistered study with a representative sample of white Americans. The survey asked them how open they would be to accepting certain refugees into the United States. The characteristics of the refugees were changed along the following three dimensions:
- Race: Refugees were either from the white country of Ukraine, or the predominately non-white country of Venezuela. Although one might suspect that this treatment would invoke stereotypes about Venezuela and Ukraine instead on non-white and white people as such, American ignorance about most of the rest of the world makes this unlikely. Luckily, the study was carried out before Ukraine jolted to the top of the headlines due to Trump’s impeachment.
- Voting behavior: Respondents were told that the new migrants would settle in Florida, a swing state, and either vote Democrat, like most immigrant groups, or vote Republican, due to previous experience with socialism. Both these stories seem plausible enough.
- Skill level: Refugees were said to be either high- or low-skilled, that is able to pull their own weight economically or likely to rely on government assistance.
Hanania’s punchline:
Race had no statistically significant effect on any group. Both conservatives and liberals, however, changed their views based on how they would vote. Only conservatives were affected by whether the refugees were said to be high-skilled and therefore presumably beneficial to the economy, or low-skilled and likely to rely on government assistance. Figure 1 below shows how partisanship, but not necessarily race, matters. The gap between the groups “very liberal” and “very conservative” in support for immigration is cut by around two-thirds when refugees are said to support Republicans instead of Democrats!
More striking to me, though, is this graph.
Notice: Not only do very liberal respondents like white migrants more than the very conservative do; very liberal respondents like Republican migrants more than very conservative ones do! To my mind this is strong evidence that Republicans’ core prejudice is not racism but xenophobia. They’re even relatively hostile to immigrants on their own side of the aisle.
No wonder Asians are so Democratic. Given their traditional values and high income, you’d expect them to be Republicans. But Asians correctly sense that Democrats respect them more.
Years ago, I proposed a simple voting model that I call the Respect Motive. Long story short: “People vote for whoever respects them more.” As long as liberals care more about Republican migrants than conservatives, expect migrant Republicans to be few and far between.
READER COMMENTS
Joe Denver
Dec 17 2020 at 9:38am
Seems like Bryan is putting the cart before the horse.
It could be that Republicans are correctly sensing that Asians are intrinsically more likely to vote democrat, and are thus hostile, and remain relatively hostile even if you tell them “these people are going to vote republican” due to skepticism of that claim.
It would be interesting to see a similar study done that makes it much more explicit that the immigrant in question will forever shift the scales towards the republican party. E.g. an immigrant from the UK whose family has voted Conservative for generations, versus an immigrant from the UK whose family has voted Labour for generations.
gwern
Dec 17 2020 at 1:52pm
You can specify hypotheticals all you want, but people will still interpret them as real-world scenarios.
In this case, there’s a simpler explanation for the results: why are Democrats always shocked in elections (like in 2016 or 2020) when Hispanics do not vote en bloc for them the way that African-Americans do, and Republicans are almost as shocked how well they do with Hispanics? Because there is a deep underlying assumption that minority groups (eg, immigrants) must vote Democrat, and if they do not, it is merely a temporary aberration and they will regress to their mean. No matter how many times expectations are defied, the gut belief remains. And if actually losing elections based on this can’t correct the universal stereotype, how can we imagine that being instructed to imagine otherwise will change peoples’ imaginings?
So anyone reading this scenario and instructed to assume that these new immigrants will vote one way will still implicitly believe that the new immigrants will eventually vote Democrat; hence, Republican hostility and Democrat favorability.
Joe Denver
Dec 17 2020 at 5:06pm
Another thought I had: assuming Bryan’s respect theory is correct. Why is immigration the deciding issue?
As Bryan himself even hinted at, there are many issues where the democratic party clearly disrespects Asians and their culture. Higher taxes, social liberalism, affirmative action, anti-family rhetoric, the demographics of candidates elected, etc.
Yet, why would they then still tend to vote democrat? Is it just that the net respect is still in the democrat’s favor?
Anonymous
Dec 17 2020 at 11:37am
How is xenophobia implicated at all? You can want lower immigration without disliking people from other countries.
Why do Democrats respect Asians more because they want more immigration? This seems like a huge logical fallacy on your part.
Why do liberals “care more about Republican migrants” than conservatives? Does it mean you care more about someone because you want them to immigrate to the U.S.? Again this is logically not the case.
The conclusion “Immigrants don’t vote Republican because if they did, Republican support for them to have been able to immigrate (which they already did) would have been a little lower than that of Democrats on average” just seems like a real stretch.
Mark Z
Dec 17 2020 at 1:59pm
One way to confirm or dispute this hypothesis IMO may be to look at changes over time. And looking at the trends for Asians and Hispanics, they don’t seem to cohere well with this theory. Asians have been trending more and more Democratic since at least the early 1990s. This trend has tentatively stopped or even started to reverse (though not enough data to say if this will continue) in 2016. Were Republicans becoming more anti-immigration back in the 1980s and 1990s, and/or were Democrats becoming more pro-immigration? Certainly, data points in 2016 and 2020 go in the opposite direction one would expect them to under Bryan’s theory, not just for Asian but Hispanic voters as well, where an unusually anti-immigration Republican outperformed more moderate predecessors among these groups.
It’s possible intensity doesn’t matter much, and that once one identifies one party with pro-immigration views and the other with anti-immigration views (I don’t know much about the politics of the 1980s and early 90s, was this the case back then? It doesn’t seem like it was as much so as it is today), that’s all that matters. A relatively pro-immigration Republican, for example, may not make a difference because it’s the ‘brand’ that matters. Of course, by the same token, voters may not think about immigrants with much granularity, and once they associate immigrants with Democrats, for example, whether a particular immigrant group is relatively Republican may not matter much to voters’ attitudes toward them.
Warren Platts
Dec 17 2020 at 4:08pm
The Democratic party is the high-income class’s party. You are much more likely to be a Democrat if you have a college degree — even more so if you have an advanced degree. Since Asian Americans have higher education rates than white people, then that alone explains why Asians skew Democratic.
Conversely, the primary Republican demographic is white working class voters who don’t have a college degree. Thus the reason they prefer fewer immigrants — especially fewer unskilled immigrants — is because they fear, rightly or wrongly, that more immigrants entails lower real wages for them.
Meanwhile, Democrats like more unskilled immigrants because they expect, rightly or wrongly, that such immigrants will raise their real wages through cheaper nannies, restaurant food, and taxi rides.
Shawn Buell
Dec 17 2020 at 4:20pm
The Democrat party’s coalition is more or less bar-bell shaped, economically, with large portions of it at the very top and very bottom of the economic ladder. Many immigrants seem to have been inculcated with the notion that the Democrat party is the party of the poor and opposed to the wealthy.
Of course, the Republicans play into this by stepping in front of class warfare bullets aimed at the ultra wealthy in big cities by supporting low tax rates for people who never vote for them and despise their social values to boot.
This couldn’t have been on better display when the SALT tax deduction was being debated for removal – and suddenly, Democrats who are always bemoaning “tax cuts for the rich” found themselves arguing in favor of a massive tax increase on wealthy people in blue states.
Republicans are also stupid because they allow the Chamber of Commerce types whose businesses thrive on the wage suppression created by an unlimited supply of third world, unskilled labor to continuously import such workers and cluck their tongues at immigration restrictionists as either racists or xenophobes.
Tiago
Dec 17 2020 at 4:23pm
I would expect their social desirability bias to be behind most of these answers. Probably Republicans feel that those are correct answers for a Republican, and Democrats do the same.
I would expect true openness to immigrants to be much more independent of partisanship and more on personality.
Shawn Buell
Dec 17 2020 at 4:23pm
Should have said “against massive tax increases” above, but there’s no edit function?
Kurt Schuler
Dec 17 2020 at 6:06pm
“Asians correctly sense that Democrats respect them more.”
Is respect what drives selective colleges, whose staffs are heavily Democratic, to discriminate against Asians in admissions? Is it what is now animating the drive to change competitive admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax, Virginia to reduce the share of Asians from the current level of 70% or so? Is it what led the Democratic Party establishment in California to support Proposition 16, which would have been used to reduce Asian attendance at UC-Berkeley and UCLA?
robc
Dec 18 2020 at 6:39am
Would be interested to see the breakdown by:
Asians who got into 1st choice college vs Asians who were discriminated against in college choice vs Asians who didnt attend college.
I bet group 1 votes D significantly higher than the other groups.
Asian
Dec 18 2020 at 1:01pm
I’m an Asian who was discriminated against in college admissions.
I voted for the anti-affirmative action slate when voting for my college board. I would vote against affirmative action on ballot referendums. I may vote for state and local Republicans if there is an issue with the use of affirmative action or quotas in my state and local schools.
But I vote for Democrats for all federal government positions, because federal government officials don’t make affirmative action policies. Nor should they, private universities should set their own policies and state university policies should be set by state governments. Even though I am against affirmative action, I am even more against the federal government dictating what admissions policies at universities should be. Meanwhile, Democrats are better on things that are actually within the purview of the federal government, such as immigration, foreign policy, and not trying to overturn election results.
Julian
Dec 22 2020 at 8:19pm
And raising your taxes good and hard.
Tom West
Dec 19 2020 at 7:23pm
I’d call that acknowledgement that colleges, like most institutions, serve multiple roles and purposes, only one of which is educating individuals in a particular subject area.
Thomas Hutcheson
Dec 18 2020 at 9:00am
What?
The surveyor is designating Venezuela as “non-white”
The Ukrainians (all from Russian-occupied Crimea?) settle in Florida?
Is the surveyor or the inquisitee speculating about the (now citizen) immigrants’ voting behavior and motivations
The survey is telling people that low-skilled immigrants are likely to go on welfare?
Scout’s honor I have not looked at the results, (and even if they showed that Democrats are liberal supporters of immigration and Republicans are racist xenophobes) I would not them as far as I can throw them.
Fred_in_PA
Dec 21 2020 at 12:47pm
Here’s half a theory (or maybe a half-broken theory):
The theory was that party allegiance would be predicted by cultural values.
That Asian immigrants tend to come from collectivist cultures with low valuation placed on individualism. And we know cultural values to be robust / persistent over time. And our modern Democratic Party is certainly our more collectivist / less individualist party.
(This may fit with Mark Z’s observation that “Asians have been trending more and more Democratic since at least the early 1990s.” But perhaps it hasn’t been Asiatics shifting Democratic so much as it’s been Democrats shifting collectivist.)
To this point I was quite please with my own cleverness. Then I went to Hofstede Insights to test my cleverness against Mexicans, Venezuelans, and Hondurans. Disaster! (Cubed.) The cultural values of those societies imply that these immigrants should feel more at home with the Democrats, too! So how are the Republicans making inroads?
What’s wrong with this theory? Is it that Asiatics are mostly economic migrants, still comfortable with their home values, while Latinos are often fleeing their home culture?
Or was the whole approach a mistake?
Or?
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