Keeping America pure

For many white Americans — the Republican Party's most important constituency, in both the primaries and the general election — immigration isn't as simple as legal versus illegal. Their primary concern is preserving American culture. It's not that these Americans care less about immigration than the people who are categorically opposed — to the contrary, these are often the people who are most concerned about who's coming into the US. It's just that their concerns don't line up with typical policy messages.

Surprisingly, Wright and his co-authors found that it wasn't common for Americans to care some about an immigrant's legal status. Either they accepted (or rejected) every single hypothetical unauthorized immigrant, or they accepted unauthorized immigrants about as often as legal immigrants — which is to say, they didn't care about legal status at all.

Most of these weren't open-border supporters who accepted every immigrant they were asked about. They were just looking at other factors: employment, education, religion, and national origin. An unauthorized Christian immigrant fared better than a legal Muslim one. An unauthorized immigrant from France fared better than a legal immigrant from Mexico, but an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico fared better than a legal immigrant from Somalia. In other words, says Wright, this group of people cares whether an immigrant will contribute to the community economically, and whether she will assimilate culturally.

That's not all that surprising. After all, polls show Americans are surprisingly ambivalent about whether immigration is a good thing for American culture. Agreement that immigrants strengthen the US rather than burdening it keeps rising, but very gradually:

immigrants strength burden Pew
Pew Research Center
Wright's study found that when looking at particular immigrants, economic factors mattered alongside cultural ones. But other studies have shown that American anxiety about immigrants' cultural impact is much more consistent than economic concerns. As one study put it, "Evidence about the role of economic concerns in opposition to immigration [...] has been inconsistent. On the other hand, symbolic attitudes such as group identities turn up as powerful in study after study."

And Latino immigrants generate more anxiety than immigrants from other regions. One study found that Americans didn't perceive Latinos as more of a threat than immigrants from other regions, but they were more anxious about them. Another found that when asked about hypothetical immigrants breaking laws or — especially — cultural norms (like stepping on an American flag), Americans were much more offended when the hypothetical immigrant was Latino than when he was European.

Unfortunately, we don't know how many white Americans are seriously anxious about the cultural threat immigrants pose. We do know, however, that when anxieties about immigration are higher, people become more likely to identify with the GOP. A 2015 book called White Backlash by UC Berkeley political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Marisa Abrajano concluded that "greater opposition to increased immigration nationwide" in one quarter was linked to an increase in partisan identification with the GOP in the next quarter.

Even the Republican candidates who take the hardest line on immigration policy — Rick Santorum and (sometimes) Scott Walker — address it in economic terms: They're worried about American jobs. But Americans are less worried about American jobs than about American culture. Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly accused the government of Mexico (and possibly other countries) of deliberately sending its worst people to immigrate to the United States. That's much closer to the heart of American anxiety.