Walker Hannah L, McCabe Katherine T, Matos Yalidy
Political Science, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Government, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA.
Polit Groups Identities. 2022;10(4):653-673. doi: 10.1080/21565503.2021.1882315. Epub 2021 Feb 18.
The growth of the Latino community has increased levels of contact between this minority group and the predominately white majority. How does exposure to immigrants impact attitudes towards immigrants and immigration held by white Americans? We argue that previous work has not adequately tested the relationship posited by inter-group contact theory, whereby contact should shape policy attitudes. We test our theory drawing on the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). We find that among non-Hispanic whites, having a loved one who is a Latino immigrant improves attitudes towards immigrants as a group, which in turn is associated with declining support for punitive immigration policy. We likewise find that attitudes towards immigrants as a group mediates the relationship between proximal contact and policy attitudes. We draw on a variety of strategies to assess the robustness of the findings and to tease out evidence for the causal pathway we theorize is at work. As the demographics of the nation continue to change, growing closer to minority-majority status, understanding the factors that shape how white Americans regard their minority neighbors is of heightened importance.
拉丁裔社区的发展增加了这个少数群体与以白人为主的多数群体之间的接触程度。接触移民如何影响美国白人对移民及移民问题的态度？我们认为，以往的研究尚未充分检验群体间接触理论所假定的关系，即接触应塑造政策态度。我们利用2018年国会合作选举研究（CCES）来检验我们的理论。我们发现，在非西班牙裔白人中，有一位拉丁裔移民亲人会改善对移民群体的态度，这反过来又与对惩罚性移民政策的支持率下降有关。我们同样发现，对移民群体的态度在近距离接触与政策态度之间的关系中起中介作用。我们采用了多种策略来评估研究结果的稳健性，并梳理出我们理论中所推测的因果路径的证据。随着美国人口结构继续变化，越来越接近少数族裔占多数的状态，了解影响美国白人如何看待其少数族裔邻居的因素变得尤为重要。
