Efren O. Perez

Dissertation

No Way José:
The Nature and Sequence of U.S. Anti-Immigrant Opinion

This dissertation examines a polemic that continuously grips the United States. The issue is immigration. The object of inquiry: Explaining the fundamental forces shaping public backlashes against foreigners. To this end, I develop and test a theoretical argument with two key inter-locking pieces. The first part of my argument addresses the nature of opposition to immigration by claiming that Americans are not so much anti-immigrant as they are anti-Latino. Using a series of original survey-experiments, I demonstrate that implicit attitudes toward Latinos shape public support for immigration policies, even when this group of immigrants is not referenced by these proposals. As such, this part of the dissertation shows how misgivings about specific immigrants mold public support for policies that affect not just that particular group, but the entire gamut of foreigners seeking entry through America's gates.
The second part of my argument balances the thrust of the first by claiming that anti-immigrant opinion is a malleable force in American politics. Using time-series analysis, I show that despite its targeted and intense nature at the individual level, anti-immigrant opinion at the macro-level responds to both short-term triggers and long-term perspectives about the United States. Viewed this way, anti-immigrant opinion is not so much a whimsical, knee-jerk response to outsiders, but rather, a gradually evolving set of attitudes toward foreigners. By coupling this line of analysis to the first, I endeavor to introduce greater nuance and precision to a controversial debate by showing how Americans--both black and white--make up their minds on immigration, and how, once made up, their collective minds are changed across time.