Sunstein: Hostility to Hispanics and Muslims Drives Anti-Immigration Sentiment
Prawf (but not immprof) Cass Sunstein has written a short piece for Bloomberg on The Real Reason So Many Americans Oppose Immigration.
Sunstein offers an overview of an empirical study published in Political Psychology (Immigration Opposition Among U.S. Whites: General Ethnocentrism or Media Priming of Attitudes About Latinos?). The central finding of that study was that “whites’ attitudes toward other groups have a ‘statistically enormous effect on negative views of the cultural and economic impact of immigration.'”
Social scientists don’t ordinarily use the word “enormous,” so what we have here is a really dramatic effect: As whites show more negative attitudes toward blacks, Asians and Hispanics, their negative feelings toward immigration skyrocket.
What’s more, the study determined that “essentially all of the movement came from negative attitudes toward Hispanics.”
Sunstein ties this data to that found in another study (How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers) which indicates that anti-Muslim sentiment drives anti-asylee attitudes in Europe.
He concludes: “Anti-immigration sentiment has become widespread, and if you’re looking to explain it, you’d do well to start with hostility to Latinos and to Muslims.”
-KitJ