Nature has color-coded people so we can make instant decisions for our well-being. It’s a great tip for who is more likely to be a friend or an enemy.
Washington Post: It’s the lashing-out theory of Trumpmania. President Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and others have speculated that working class whites are signing on to Donald Trump and his inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric out of a deepening anxiety over their place in the 21st century American economy.
Some political scientists, however, say antagonism toward immigrants is being driven by a more primal instinct: mistrust of outsiders — or even racial prejudice, either of the conscious or unconscious variety.
A body of academic research has tried to deconstruct why some Americans are skeptical about immigrants. Are they driven by policy concerns, about economics, or security? A general dubiousness about foreigners? Or a deep-seated aversion to people of a different skin tone?
A study forthcoming in the journal Political Psychology sheds new light on these questions. Political scientist Mara Ostfeld, who will be an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, randomly assigned white, non-Hispanic people to read different fictional stories about an immigrant family.
In one version of the story, the immigrants are sitting at a diner eating buffalo wings and discussing baseball. In another, the immigrants are at an ethnic food market eating spicy goat meat and talking in their native tongue.
After seeing the stories, the people were asked broad questions about immigration policy.
People who read about the American-acting immigrants expressed more positive feelings about immigrants and immigration policy in general — they were more likely to believe immigrants are helping America, more likely to support increasing the number of immigrants, and less likely to support building a fence on the Mexican border.
In other words, Ostfeld showed that people’s attitudes about immigration can be nudged just by having them read stories about immigrants who behave in traditionally American ways…
On all these measures, respondents shown the darker-skinned immigrants were less likely to be accepting. Asked for their feelings about these scenarios a scale of 1 to 10, people given the darker pictures were about half a point less enthusiastic on average.
It’s hard to detect racial prejudice in surveys because people tend to censor themselves when a stranger asks directly. But by comparing subjects who were randomly shown different pictures, Ostfeld got to measure people’s knee-jerk biases.
Ostfeld’s study shows that context matters to the immigration debate. “It’s really important we understand that our perceptions of threat are different, whether we’re thinking about immigration in the abstract or in our own communities,” she says.
When the discussion is about immigration policy in general, people are mostly concerned with way immigrants act, not the way they look. Will the newcomers fit in? Will they adopt American ways of life, or change what it means to be American? But if you get specific — if you talk about immigrants moving in next door — then people’s racial biases also start coming to the fore…
This issue has become particularly salient as immigration takes center stage in the GOP presidential primary. Trump has rallied supporters by inflaming their anxieties about immigrants, calling some Mexicans rapists and Syrian refugees terrorists. Trump’s platform makes this a local issue, talking about the impact of immigration on “communities, schools and unemployment offices.”
Earlier this month, the New York Times published data suggesting that the most racist places in America — where people tend to make the most “racially charged” Google searches — are often the same areas where Trump has the strongest support among conservatives.
Researchers have found that racism tends to predict anti-immigrant views. Public opinion surveys, for example, show that whites who hold negative stereotypes about blacks are also more likely to oppose immigration, and to support making English the official language of the United States. This is a “surprising” result, the authors note, because most immigrants these days are not black, but Latino or Asian.
While many have blamed economic stress for causing Trump voters to direct their anger at immigrants, these and other studies show that views against immigration are often guided by deeper instincts.
“In fact, the evidence suggests there’s more to the view that it’s all about culture — that people are threatened by different ways of life, different religions, and different languages,” says Shanto Iyengar, a political science professor at Stanford. “You have a bunch of other people speaking other languages, with brown skin, going to temples and mosques, and that is what is making people oppose immigration.”
