Geographic Identity and Attitudes toward Undocumented Immigrants

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919843349
• Author: Lorrie Frasure-Yokley,Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: Identity Politics and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919843349

Political Research Quarterly

2019, Vol. 72(4) 944 –959

© 2019 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919843349

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Mini-Symposium: Identity Politics and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Undocumented immigration is often used as a highly

racialized and politicized tool to divide the polity along

race/ethnicity, class, ideology, partisanship, and other

identities (HoSang 2010). During his 2015 announcement

speech, declaring his bid for President, Donald Trump

used racial appeals and anti-immigration rhetoric to

position himself as the nationalist candidate. Following

the 2016 election, Trump’s nativist and xenophobic

rhetoric continued to frame immigrants, particularly

undocumented immigrants, as terrorist and criminals.

Such rhetoric was put into action as he sought to dismantle

the Obama Administration’s executive orders toward

undocumented immigrants. Yet, for close observers,

Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric was not new and further

heightened and nationalized growing concerns among

conservatives over immigration policies, specifically

related to undocumented immigrants (Bowler, Nicholson,

and Segura 2006; Hopkins 2018; HoSang 2010; Robinson

et al. 2016).

Existing scholarship has documented widespread vari-

ation in both attitudes toward immigrants given features

of one’s local context (Hopkins 2010; Newman 2013;

Rocha et al. 2011; Walker 2010, 2014; Winders 2012, but

see also Huo et al. 2018) and the localized nature of xeno-

phobic immigration appeals (Baerg, Hotchkiss, and

Quispe-Agnoli 2018; Brader, Valentno, and Suhay 2008;

Hajnal and Rivera 2014; Reny 2017). In the aftermath of

the 2016 Presidential election, public opinion toward

racialized immigration policy proposals and undocu-

mented immigrants, more broadly, is incomplete without

understanding the role of place and geographic identity.

In the 2016 general election, 62 percent of rural voters

cast a ballot for Trump, as compared with 50 percent of

suburban voters, and 35 percent of urban voters. Scholars

have long examined the role of place-based differences in

Presidential vote choice (Gainsborough 2001, 2005;

Hirsch 1968; McKee and Shaw 2003; Schneider 1992).

However, fewer studies have examined the extent to

which place may influence the individual views toward a

persistent hot-button issue, such as undocumented immi-

gration. This is particularly important given the hyper

salience of this issue during the 2016 Presidential elec-

tion and as a central feature of the Trump administration.

Existing frameworks which largely rely on proximity

843349PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919843349Political Research QuarterlyFrasure-Yokley and Wilcox-Archuleta

research-article2019

1University of California, Los Angeles, USA

2Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

Corresponding Author:

Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, Department of Political Science, University

of California, Los Angeles, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095,

USA.

Email: bwa@g.ucla.edu

Geographic Identity and Attitudes

toward Undocumented Immigrants

Lorrie Frasure-Yokley1 and Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta1,2

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which economic attitudes, political predispositions, neighborhood context, and

socio-demographic factors influence views toward adult, undocumented immigrants living and working in the United

States. We specifically examine how these factors differ for respondents living in various types of American urban,

suburban, and rural areas. Arguably, in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, public opinion toward often

racialized immigration policy proposals is incomplete without an understanding of the role of place and geographic

identity. In the 2016 general election, 62 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump, as compared with 50

percent of suburban voters, and 35 percent of urban voters. However, we know little about how their views toward

undocumented immigration, a persistent hot-button issue, varied by geographic type. Our findings suggest that views

toward undocumented immigrants currently living and working in the United States are conditioned by factors related

to a respondent’s geographic type. We find that attitudes toward immigrants vary considerably across place. These

findings provide support to our argument about the development of a geographic-based identity that has considerable

impact on important public opinion attitudes, even after controlling for more traditional explanatory factors.

Keywords

immigration, racial politics, public opinion, geography, identity, survey methods

Frasure-Yokley and Wilcox-Archuleta 945

(Enos 2016; Reny and Newman 2018), demographic

change (Hopkins 2010; Newman 2013; Newman and

Velez 2014), and the role of policy entrepreneurs in mak-

ing immigration a salient issue (Hopkins 2010) suggest a

need to more fully understand the variation in these atti-

tudes across community types, which may influence

one’s beliefs about policies toward undocumented

immigrants.

This research seeks to advance scholarship in both

the influence of political identity and the American

public opinion related to immigration attitudes. On one

hand, scholars of identity politics have largely focused

on the role of race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, reli-

gion, and other markers at the individual level, with

less attention to the role of geographic identity. On the

other hand, public opinion scholars, whose work cen-

ters on immigration attitudes, particularly toward

undocumented immigrants, largely focus on factors

such as the size or growth of immigrants within close

proximity, national- or state-level economic condi-

tions, political predispositions, and socio-demograph-

ics, with little attention to the type of respondent’s

geographic context along other dimensions.

Moreover, existing conceptualizations of place in politi-

cal science often still relies on crude distinctions in com-

munity type (suburban, rural, and urban) or along a

urban–rural continuum, which fail to account for the com-

plexity of residential life and residential patterns at the

local level (Frasure-Yokley 2015). Despite a decrease in

suburban and exurban growth in the wake of the post-2007

Great Recession and mortgage meltdown (Frey 2012), the

suburbs are again witnessing a “growth revival,” due in

part to immigration from Latin America and Asia (Frey

2018). According to Wilson and Svajlenka (2014), three

quarters (76%) of the growth in the foreign-born popula-

tion between 2000 and 2013 in the largest metro areas

occurred in the suburbs. In fifty-three metro areas, the sub-

urbs accounted for more than half of immigrant growth,

including nine metros in which all the growth occurred in

the suburbs: Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids,

Jackson, Los Angeles, Ogden, Rochester, and Salt Lake

City. The rapid suburbanization of America’s newest

immigrants has changed the demographic landscape and

increased the policy focus on undocumented immigration

at the local level (Frasure-Yokley 2015; Frasure-Yokley

and Jones-Correa 2010; Singer 2004; Singer, Wilson, and

DeRenzis 2009; Williamson 2010).

To address some of these concerns and provide a

framework with which to understand the role of metro-

politan and suburban space, we use a typology of place

adapted from Myron Orfield’s (2002) American

Metropolitics, to classify individual’s local context

into a schema that seeks to provide a more fine-tuned

understanding of how place influences attitudes toward

undocumented immigrants. Applying this classifica-

tion, we find that community types matter in how resi-

dents of those communities think about undocumented

immigrants. While existing work has made clear a

relationship between contextual features and attitudes

toward immigrants (Hopkins 2010; Newman 2013;

Newman and Velez 2014), we expand this work

through the development of specific community types.

These community types which range from central cit-

ies, bedroom communities, and affluent suburbs mark

an important and multi-dimensional distinction in the

type of community which people reside in. We theorize

that these community types foster a place-based iden-

tity, one that impacts important political attitudes.

Using this framework, we predict that attitudes will

vary across community type as political orientations and

various attachments to certain social categories are linked

to one’s local context (Wilcox-Archuleta 2018). To test

our framework, we use the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial

Post-Election Survey (CMPS) merged with data from the

U.S. Census. We first classify respondents into a com-

munity type based on several census-measured character-

istics at the zipcode level using a k-means clustering

approach adapted from Orfield (2002). We are then able

to examine the extent to which economic attitudes, ideol-

ogy, neighborhood context, and socio-demographic fac-

tors influence views toward adult, undocumented

immigrants living and working in the United States con-

ditional on one’s neighborhood type. We specifically

examine how these attitudes differ for respondents living

in various types of American geographic types.

We find that attitudes toward immigrants vary con-

siderably across place. Those who live in the central

city, what has traditionally been classified as “urban,”

are the most supportive of undocumented immigrants.

Consistent with existing work, those who live in low-

density areas, what has traditionally been considered

more “rural” context, are the least supportive of undoc-

umented immigrants. Those living in areas broadly

categorized as suburbs (bedroom developing, at risk,

and affluent) have attitudes toward undocumented

immigrants more favorable than those in more rural

areas but less favorable than those living in the central

city. These findings lend support to our argument that

a geographic-based identity may impact one’s public

opinion attitudes, even after controlling for more tradi-

tional explanatory factors. Our key contribution is

thinking about the role of geographic identity and the

multi-dimensional attributes that are characteristic of

various geographic types. Our evidence suggests that

the type of place matters for attitudes toward undocu-

mented immigrants.