Postdoctoral Fellow

As the immigration issue has gained renewed attention in national politics and a more restrictive sentiment has spread among the mass public, many scholars assert that immigration has returned as the new contemporary race issue for American politics. We posit that for both white and black Americans, the perceived race or ethnicity of the immigrant group strongly influences their understandings of immigration and immigration policy. To test this, we utilize an embedded survey experiment that allows us to analyze the effect of implicit racial primes on individual attitudes towards immigration. The experiment was designed to observe whether viewing immigrants as Latino versus Asian American increases intolerance toward immigrants and engenders support for more restrictive immigration policies. We hypothesize that messages which link Latinos with immigration are more likely to garner stronger support for restrictive immigration policies than racialized messages that link other groups such as Asian Americans. Although the experiment yielded findings that suggest that whites and blacks may not perceive non-black minority groups as threatening as scholars have hypothesized, the results more importantly raise new issues about the unique effects of implicit racial appeals that target non-black minority groups on individual racial attitudes