Immigration & the Origins of - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Immigration & the Origins of
White Backlash

Zoltan Hajnal

The success of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign surprised many. But I
show that it was actually a continuation of a long-standing Republican strategy
that has targeted immigrants and minorities for over five decades. It is not only a
long-term strategy but also a widely successful one. Analysis of the vote over time
shows clearly that White Americans with anti-immigrant views have been shifting
steadily toward the Republican Party for decades. The end result is a nation divid-
ed by race and outcomes that often favor Whites over immigrants and minorities.

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“They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bring-
ing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing
crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

W ith these now infamous lines about Mexican immigrants, President

Trump appeared to set in motion his meteoric rise in the 2016 presi-
dential campaign. Before giving that speech, Trump was floundering.
Polls placed him near the bottom of the sixteen-candidate Republican field. Ma
just a month later–after almost nonstop coverage of his immigration remarks–
Trump had skyrocketed to first place in the polls. In the primary, Trump won
over Republican voters who wanted to deport unauthorized immigrants, and he
lost decisively among those who favored a pathway to citizenship. Infatti, immi-
gration appeared to fuel his candidacy all the way through the general election.
Three-quarters of Trump voters felt that illegal immigrants were “mostly a drain”
on American society. Only 11 percent of Clinton supporters agreed.1

Trump’s focus on immigration and the tight link between immigration views
and the vote in 2016 raise a series of important questions. Primo, where did the
immigration threat strategy come from? Was Trump’s strategy unique and the
course of 2016 exceptional, as many media accounts seem to suggest, or was 2016
simply an extension–albeit a more explicit and more extreme one–of a longer-
term Republican project? Secondo, is there evidence that an immigrant threat nar-
rative has actually propelled voters into the welcoming hands of the Republican
Party? Although the close correlation between how Americans think about immi-

gration and how they voted in 2016 suggests that immigration matters, and per-
haps even that it is central to the partisan politics of this nation, we know that cor-
relation is not causation. Finalmente, what are some of the major consequences of the
increasingly central role of immigration in American politics?

A lthough many pundits and prognosticators were surprised by Donald

Trump’s tactics and his triumphs, it was all quite predictable. Trump’s
use of the immigrant threat narrative is a tried and true strategy. Well
before Donald Trump arrived on the presidential scene, Marisa Abrajano and I
wrote a book documenting the long-standing Republican tactic of scapegoating
immigrants. In White Backlash, we argue that Republican elites had been able to
garner more and more of the White vote by blaming immigrants for much of what
ails America and by promising to stem the tide of immigration.2

The evidence of that long-term Republican strategy is extensive. It begins most
conspicuously in California in 1994 when Pete Wilson, the Republican governor,
campaigned on Proposition 187 to help counter his low approval ratings and sag-
ging poll numbers. The proposition, which was nicknamed the “save our state”
measure, sought to bar all undocumented immigrants from receiving public ser-
vices. Campaign ads featuring grainy footage of immigrant hordes crossing the
border, while a narrator intoned “They keep coming. . .” would become a model
for subsequent Republican campaigns.

When Wilson won reelection using that strategy, Republicans around the
country slowly took heed. In the ensuing decades, elites in both parties have ex-
pressed a variety of views on immigration, but the growing distance between the
two parties on immigration is clear. Much of the early activity occurred at the state
level with Republican-led state legislatures around the country passing thousands
of laws that explicitly limited immigrants’ rights or services.3 Perhaps the best-
known example of these anti-immigrant laws is Arizona’s SB1070, passed in 2010,
which allowed police officers to target individuals suspected of being undocu-
mented, prohibited unauthorized immigrants from applying for work, required
individuals to carry their alien registration cards, and permitted warrantless ar-
rest in cases involving probable cause of a deportable offense.

Many local Republican officials also clearly moved to the right on immigra-
zione. That movement was epitomized by Joe Arpaio, the former Republican Sher-
iff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who proudly proclaimed that “Nothing is go-
ing to stop me from cracking down on illegal immigration.” By 2008, the issue
was receiving more prominent attention at the national level and even Mitt Rom-
ney, a member of the more moderate wing of the Republican Party, was including
self-deportation and opposition to the Dream Act as part of his presidential plat-
form. As one of his ads announced, “As President, I’ll oppose amnesty, cut fund-
ing for sanctuary cities, and secure our borders.”

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

These increasingly divergent stances on immigration are borne out by votes in
Congress. As political science researchers Gary Miller and Norman Schofield have
demonstrated, Republican support for immigrants’ rights was reasonably strong
during the Reagan era and, as late as 1990, immigration-related legislation gener-
ated little noticeable partisan division. Infatti, Ronald Reagan signed a law that
granted amnesty to almost three million undocumented immigrants. But since
that time, votes in Congress have revealed an increasingly stark contrast, with Re-
publican legislators repeatedly supporting tougher laws against immigrants and
Democrats favoring more admission and greater immigrants’ rights.4

Political scientist Tom Wong has found that between 2006 E 2012, Repub-
lican House and Senate members favored restrictive policies 98.4 percent of the
time, while Democrats supported those measures only 66.4 percent of the time.5
On any number of different immigration-related issues–erecting border fences,
English as the official language, amnesty, government workers reporting undoc-
umented immigrants, and so-called anchor babies (the U.S.-born children of im-
migrants)–Republicans and Democrats are increasingly on opposite sides of the
immigration debate.

The strategy may have reached its apex in 2018 with Donald Trump’s explic-
it comments about Mexican immigrants–“These aren’t people. These are an-
imals”–but decades of Republican campaigns have developed and proliferated
the strategy; Trump is only continuing it. Despite the ubiquitous talk of Trump
being extraordinary, the truth is, the patterns in 2016 mirror decades of American
campaigns and elections.

All of this reprises a very old and quintessentially American story on immi-
gration. America may be a nation of immigrants, but it has not always welcomed
immigrants with open arms. Immigration has often sparked widespread fear and
mobilization, especially when the number of new arrivals has been large, or when
the makeup of new Americans has differed from the native born in obvious ra-
cial or ethnic ways.6 Indeed, the history of the nation can be told through a se-
ries of challenging immigrant-nativist confrontations. The rising tide of German
and French migrants at the end of the eighteenth century sparked one of the first
large-scale nativist movements. Numerous episodes followed: anti-Irish discrim-
ination in the 1850s, a populist backlash against Chinese immigrants in the 1880s,
prevalent anti-Southern and Eastern European sentiment in the early twentieth
century, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and a back-
lash against Muslim Americans following September 11.7

Critically, with each wave of immigration to American shores, savvy politi-
cians have attempted to use anxiety about immigration to garner votes. As a re-
sult, many of these nativist episodes were shaped by and had a real impact on the
partisan politics of the day. The electoral advantage of immigration often accrued
to the party–new or old–that most vociferously opposed immigration. In the

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

1850S, Per esempio, a nativist backlash against Irish Catholic immigrants helped
spur the Know Nothings and the American Party to electoral success.8

In definitiva, neither concerns about immigrants nor political parties seeking to
gain from those concerns are new. Trump and the Republican Party of today are
just one example of a recurring, longer-term phenomenon. È, Ovviamente, also
important to note that this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Trump’s rise
is analogous to the rise of the extreme right in Europe and mirrors the success of
the UK Independence Party in Britain, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Na-
tional Front in France, among many others.

But the Trump phenomenon and the larger Republican campaign are not just
about immigration. The anti-immigrant story is only part of the White backlash
story. Race, more broadly speaking, has been part of the Republican playbook for
quite some time.9 A little over five decades ago, the Republican Party implement-
ed its infamous Southern Strategy. Personified by George Wallace’s segregationist
rhetoric, the Republican strategy was to dismiss Black demands for justice as re-
quests for ever-greater government handouts and to highlight the failings of the
Black community in order to attract racially conservative White Southerners who
had up to that point faithfully supported the Democratic Party. Through Gold-
water, Nixon, Reagan, and onto George H. W. Bush, the campaign tactics were
sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle. While Wallace would proclaim
“Segregation now, segregation forever,” a conservative political action commit-
tee supporting George H. W. Bush more delicately ran an ad about Willie Horton,
an African American felon, to stoke fear of Black crime. Almost always there was
a hint of race in the air and at least an implicit denigration of African Americans.
For White Southerners, it was all too attractive. White Southerners who over-
whelmingly sided with the Democratic Party in 1960 overwhelmingly voted for
Republican candidates in 1990. And it was not just White Southerners. Since 1990,
racial views and partisanship have only become more intertwined at the national
level. For much of this recent period, racial resentment has been one of the stron-
gest predictors of party affiliation.10 Barack Obama’s presidency only increased
the importance of racial views. As political scientist Michael Tesler has so aptly
demonstrated, how people think about health care and a host of other ostensibly
nonracial issues is now highly correlated with their racial views.11

All of this has fed back into the Trump phenomenon. Research during the 2016
primary campaign showed that White independents and Republicans whose ra-
cial identity was important to them were more than thirty points more likely to
support Trump than those who did not think their racial identity was important.12
Another study found that racial resentment, more than populism or authoritar-
ianism, determined who supported Trump and who did not in the general elec-
tion.13 In short, Trump’s rise is neither surprising nor unusual. It is a logical out-
growth of decades of a Republican strategy on immigration and race.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

S uperficially, at least, the strategy seems to be incredibly successful. Study

after study has now demonstrated a close relationship between how Amer-
icans think about immigration and how they vote. My own research shows
that this relationship was already firmly in place in 2008 when Barack Obama ran
for president for the first time. Americans with the most positive views of undoc-
umented immigrants tended at that time not to vote Republican for president or
Congress. Only 18 percent did so for president and only 23 percent did so for Con-
gress. By contrast, a clear majority of those with negative views of undocumented
immigrants favored Republican candidates in 2008: 68 percent in congressional
elections and 77 percent in the presidential election.

And the relationship only becomes tighter over time. In 2016, as I have already
noted, 76 percent of Americans who thought the government should identify and
deport undocumented immigrants supported Trump, whereas 77 percent of those
who disagreed voted for Clinton.14 Further analysis shows that views on immi-
gration were equally closely linked to the congressional vote, the gubernatorial
vote, and the state legislative vote that year.15 By the 2018 midterms, there was an
almost perfect correlation between immigration and the vote. Almost everyone
(91 per cento) who opposed granting legal status to people brought into the country
as children voted for Republican candidates for Congress, while almost everyone
(92 per cento) who supported granting legal status to the same immigrants voted
Democratic.16

But before making causal claims about that relationship, we need to consider
the possibility that the link between views on immigration and partisan choice is
spurious: a by-product of a connection with one or more other factors such as at-
titudes on war, the economy, terrorism, gay rights, or race. Any number of the is-
sues on which the two parties have squared off could be driving the link between
immigration and party.

One empirical strategy to interrogate the independent effect of immigration
on the vote is to control for other factors that might impact it. For that analysis,
Michael Rivera and I considered a wide range of positions on other issues, ad esempio
attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities, perceptions of the economy, parti-
sanship, ideological position, demographic characteristics, and just about every-
thing else we think matters in presidential or congressional elections.17 Perform-
ing that analysis on the 2008 presidential election, we found that even after taking
into account all of these different factors, how White Americans think about im-
migrants is still strongly related to how they vote. Nel 2008 presidential contest,
Whites with negative views of immigrants were–all else equal–24 percent more
likely to vote for John McCain than for Barack Obama. Views on immigration
mattered to a striking degree, eclipsing other issues in an election taking place
against the backdrop of one of the nation’s sharpest recessions, ongoing wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and with the nation’s first Black presidential nominee on

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

the ballot. The relationship between immigration and partisanship is not just a
spurious one.

That analysis revealed one other important aspect of America’s views on im-
migration, and in particular how those attitudes are and are not related to views
on race. IL 2008 data show that, in many ways, race and immigration are con-
nected. How Americans feel about Blacks and how Americans feel about immi-
grants are related. Those who are anxious about immigration also often resent de-
mands made by African Americans. I suspect that a lot of these feelings toward
both groups have the same roots. Infatti, studies have shown that both attitudes
on race and attitudes on immigration are closely linked to deep-seated psycholog-
ical predispositions such as authoritarianism, intolerance, and ethnocentrism.18

Tuttavia, immigration and race represent distinct dimensions, as the data
make clear. Attitudes on race and immigration are correlated, but the correlation
is not all that strong. In this particular case, the correlation between racial resent-
ment and anti-immigrant attitudes is just 0.28, meaning that relatively little of
one attitude can be explained by the other. Even more important, the fact that im-
migration predicts the vote even after taking into account racial views indicates
that immigration has an impact beyond race.19 Further, the fact that we found that
the size of the anti-immigration effects is roughly on par with the effects of racial
attitudes suggests that immigration represents not only a distinct dimension of
American politics but an important one as well.

But before one can be absolutely confident that attitudes on immigration are
actually driving party identification and the vote, one more test is needed to rule out
the possibility that party identification is itself the main driver of change. Individ-
ual Americans could be taking cues from partisan leaders, adjusting their stances
on immigration to match those of a party that they know, trust, and believe in.
Party identification, Poi, could be driving immigration attitudes, rather than the
reverse.

We can examine this issue of “what causes what” by analyzing the same indi-
vidual’s views at different points over time. The key test is whether an individual
American’s position on immigration at one point in time shapes future changes
in that individual’s partisanship. Questo è, can we accurately predict who will shift
to the Republican Party in the future based only on how those people think about
immigration today? For these causality tests, we focused on panel data from the
American National Election Study, which repeatedly asked the same respondents
for their views and partisanship. Based on these tests, it is clear that how an indi-
vidual thinks about immigration at one point in time predicts how their partisan-
ship will change in the future. To be sure, the effect is not large. Over the course of
a single year (in one case from 2008 A 2009), those with more negative views on
immigration shift about one-quarter of a point more to the right on a seven-point
party identification scale.20 But if these small shifts accumulate over time, Essi

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

could help to account for large-scale partisan changes. Others have likewise found
that attitudes on immigration help to predict which Americans would ultimately
shift their votes from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.21

We also find that views on immigration predict future shifts in partisanship
at the aggregate or national level. Analyzing national patterns in aggregate White
partisanship–the relative share of Democrats and Republicans in the White pop-
ulation–over the last two decades, we found that aggregate views on immigra-
tion at one point in time predict changes in aggregate White partisanship in sub-
sequent periods.22 The size of the effect is again far from massive, but it is mean-
ingful. A standard deviation shift in support for immigration is associated with a
little less than one-tenth of a point shift on the five-point partisanship scale.

There are other signs as well. When we look at the media, we see yet more evi-
dence of the power of immigration. Specifically, we find that increases in negative
coverage of Latino immigration by the media are correlated with shifts in aggre-
gate White partisanship toward the Republican Party. Analyzing three decades of
New York Times coverage of immigration, we find that the tone of that coverage is
overwhelmingly negative: there were four times as many negative news stories on
immigration as there were positive news stories. Even more important, we find
that the more negative stories focused on Latino immigrants in one quarter, IL
more Whites identified with the Republican Party in the next quarter. In questo caso,
the effects were substantial. In the analysis, shifts in media frames on immigra-
tion had just as much impact on future partisanship as perceptions of the state of
the economy and presidential performance.

Over time, all of this is likely to add up to major changes in the partisan leanings
of the nation–or at least of the White population. As Figure 1 shows, during this
period of Republican anti-immigrant tactics, there has been a slow, sometimes un-
even, but also very clear movement of Whites toward the Republican Party and its
candidates. In 1990, before Republican candidates had embarked on the immigrant
threat narrative, White voters were almost evenly divided in their support of Dem-
ocratic and Republican congressional candidates, and there was almost no correla-
tion between attitudes on immigration and White partisanship. In 2016, after years
of Republican campaigning against immigrants, views on immigration were tightly
linked to the vote and Whites had become decidedly Republican in their congres-
sional choices. In 2016, only 38 percent of White voters favored Democratic candi-
dates in congressional contests. In 2020, the number was only 41 per cento. Trump
simply represents the apex of a long-term anti-immigrant backlash strategy.

There is little doubt that many factors are contributing to the defection of
White America from the Democratic Party. But one can make a plausible case that
a backlash to immigration is helping drive this most significant development in
American party politics in the twenty-first century. The striking feature of the em-
pirical patterns here is not that immigration matters. NOI. history amply demon-

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

Figura 1
Declining White Support for House Democrats

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1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016

Fonte: American National Election Study, Cumulative File.

strates that many White Americans have felt threatened by different racial/ethnic
groups at various times. The arresting feature is, instead, just how wide-ranging
those effects remain today. In a political era in which many claim that the signifi-
cance of race has faded, immigrant-related views impact the political orientation
of many members of the White population. Party identification–the most influ-
ential variable in U.S. politics–is at least in part a function of the way individual
White Americans see immigrants. So, pure, is the vote in national contests for pres-
ident and Congress. In short, the immigration backlash is real and it is powerful.

T he successful efforts of the Republican Party and in particular Donald

Trump to bring the issue of immigration to the center of American pol-
itics have had major consequences for immigrants, for our polity, and for

our nation as a whole.

The most obvious consequence of the increasing centrality of immigration in
our politics is the lack of progress on immigration policy. In spite of the fact that
large segments of the American public hold fairly positive views of immigrants,
and the fact that a majority of Americans seem to be sympathetic to at least sub-
sets of the immigrant population (such as Dreamers), there has been almost no
movement forward on immigration policy in the last few decades. Prior to Donald
Trump’s presidency, the federal government basically experienced a multidecade

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

stalemate on immigration, passing few or no major policy initiatives. Infatti, one
could argue that the Republican focus on the costs of immigration and the height-
ened anxiety that the immigrant threat narrative has produced has led to signifi-
cant regression in terms of immigration policy. In particular, the Trump adminis-
tration repealed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program,23
eliminated Temporary Protected Status for tens of thousands of Central Ameri-
cans, severely limited the number of refugees allowed into the country, increased
the number of apprehensions at the border (particularly by targeting families),
widened the scope of deportations, spent considerable funds to extend the border
wall with Mexico, prevented asylum seekers from entering the country, E, at
one point, banned almost all legal immigration to the United States.

Critically, shifts in policy have not only occurred at the federal level. As I al-
ready noted, in the last two decades, state legislatures have passed over three
thousand laws that dealt explicitly with immigration or immigrants. Inoltre,
the clear majority of these substantively significant laws have served to limit rath-
er than expand immigrants’ rights or interests.24 During this period, states have
done everything from reducing or eliminating immigrants’ access to public ser-
vices in education, health, and welfare, to allowing the police to target individu-
als suspected of being undocumented. Unfortunately, for immigrants themselves,
the states with the largest Latino populations have been the most active and the
most aggressive. Texas, a state with one of the highest shares of Latino and undoc-
umented residents, passed seven anti-immigrant laws between 2007 E 2009, In-
cluding measures to detect and deter undocumented immigrant use of state Med-
icaid, to reduce eligibility for the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program,
and to require private companies that work with the state to demonstrate that
they do not employ unauthorized workers.

But Texas is not alone. Arizona, a state in which Latinos make up 30 percent of
the population, passed twelve anti-immigrant measures over that same time pe-
riod. Arizona’s 2010 efforts included the passage of the well-known SB1070, one
of the strictest anti-immigrant measures ever passed. Over the same time frame,
Colorado, likewise, ushered eleven anti-immigrant bills into law, including one
requiring that employers be notified of the prohibition against hiring an unautho-
rized alien, and another that tied unemployment insurance benefits to citizenship.
Further analysis in White Backlash indicates that the backlash is not confined
to measures that explicitly mention immigrants or immigration. The immigrant
threat narrative has been so pervasive that it has crept into debates about poli-
cy issues that are ostensibly not about immigration. Public discussions related
to welfare, health, formazione scolastica, criminal justice, taxes, and many other subjects
have been infused with images and stories of the undocumented and the heavy
economic, cultural, and criminal costs that these immigrants put on American
society.

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

The net result is that state policy across a host of different arenas has become
intricately connected to the immigrant population. In particular, how states raise
and spend their money is closely linked to the size of the immigrant population.
Tavolo 1 demonstrates this relationship at its simplest level. I compare basic state
policy in heavily Latino states to policy in states with smaller Latino populations.
I focus on the size of the Latino population because I believe that the broader Lati-
no population is the most visible shortcut for the immigrant population in the
minds of many White Americans. 25 Infatti, there is plenty of evidence that when
White Americans think about immigration, the image they have in their head is
an undocumented Latino.26

As Table 1 reveals, larger concentrations of Latinos tend to be associated with
state-level policies that are more regressive, more punitive, and less generous. Re-
distributive spending–money for health care and education–is lower in states
where the beneficiaries of the policies are more likely to be Latinos.27 In the case
of health care funding, the gap is sizeable. Medicaid spending drops 32 per cento
in heavily Latino states. The pattern is the opposite for punitive criminal justice
spending. In states where Latinos represent a large share of the population and
could be the target of tougher laws and harsher sentences, spending on prisons is
substantially higher. Again, the absolute difference in the share of the budget go-
ing to prisons is small, but the gap represents a 21 percent increase in the share of
the budget going to prisons. Critically, these relationships persist in regressions
after controlling for a range of other factors that could be driving spending pat-
terns. As the Latino population grows, Americans become less willing to invest in
public services like education, health, and welfare, and are more willing to fund
prisons. In other words, when the policy is more apt to impact Latinos, benefici
decline and punishment increases.28 All of this indicates that America’s increas-
ingly diverse population is generating a real, wide-ranging backlash. It also means
that as immigration has become more central to our politics, immigrants have
been the ones who lose most.

A nother obvious outgrowth of the Republican Party’s heavy focus on immi-

gration is electoral success. The immigrant threat narrative may not win
extra votes in every election or in every context, but the Republican Party’s
shift to the right on immigration has almost certainly contributed to their largely
winning the electoral battle against Democrats. Since the mid-1990s, when Repub-
licans began their immigrant threat narrative campaign, the Republican Party has
gone from being essentially shut out of government to having a relatively domi-
nant position. In the mid-1990s, Democrats controlled the presidency, House, Sen-
ate, and the majority of state governments. As I write at the end of 2020, Repub-
licans control the presidency and the Senate, they have solidified a conservative
majority in the Supreme Court and recast the federal and appeals court judiciary,

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

Tavolo 1
Government Policy in Heavily Latino States Is More Regressive
(Share of All State Spending)

States with a
Small Latino
Population

States with a
Large Latino
Population

Proportional
Difference in
Spending

Spending

Health Care

3.7%

Corrections

3.9%

Education

25.8%

Taxation

Sales Tax

27.5%

Property Tax

5.8%

2.5%

4.7%

24.8%

36.4%

1.3%

–32%

+ 21%

–4%

+ 32%

–78%

Fonte: Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, NOI. Census.

they occupy the majority of the governor’s mansions, they control a majority of
state legislatures, and they are the majority party in a majority of states. Many dif-
ferent factors have contributed to this decades-long partisan shift, but the willing-
ness of Republican leaders increasingly and vocally to embrace an anti-immigrant
narrative has rewarded the Party with a larger and larger slice of the White vote and
widespread electoral victories from the local to the national level. Donald Trump,
perhaps more than anyone else, knows this. As he told The New York Times Editorial
Board: “I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.”

Whether the immigrant backlash strategy will continue to produce political
victories in the future, as the racial and ethnic minority population continues to
grow, is another question altogether. But it is worth noting that there are still many
White Democrats with relatively racially conservative or anti-immigrant views.
And when informed that the United States is poised to become a majority-minority
nation in the middle part of this century, experiments show that White views
tend to shift even further to the right.29 Given that White Americans still repre-
sent over 70 percent of all voters, and still more White voters could defect from
the Democratic Party, Republicans could potentially reap the benefits of an anti-
immigrant narrative long into the future.

A less obvious but equally important consequence of the immigrant threat
campaign being waged by the Republican Party is an increasingly racially divided

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

electorate. Just as many Whites have been attracted by the anti-immigrant rheto-
ric of the Republican Party, many racial and ethnic minorities have been repelled.
Over the last few decades, more and more racial and ethnic minorities have en-
tered the country, more and more have become engaged in the political arena, E
perhaps most important, they have spoken with an increasingly clear political
voice. In particular, the last three decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in Asian
American partisanship. In the early 1990s, the Republican Party held a slight edge
among Asian Americans, but by 2018, the number of Asian Americans who identi-
fy as Democrats outnumbers the number of Asian American Republicans two-to-
one.30 Movement among the Latino is less obvious, but what is clear is that both
Latinx and African American voters remain firmly entrenched in the Democratic
Party. Two-thirds or more of the Latinx vote typically sides with the Democratic
Party. For African Americans, the figure is generally closer to 85 per cento.

All of this is readily apparent in Figure 2, which illustrates the changing racial
composition of the two major parties over time. The White share of Democrat-
ic Party votes has declined sharply since the 1960s. As the population has become
more diverse, and as more minorities have shifted to the Democratic Party, IL
Democratic base has become more diverse. Today, a little fewer than half of Dem-
ocratic voters are non-White. By contrast, Republicans have remained steadfastly
White despite the increasing diversity of the nation. Almost all of the votes that
Republican candidates receive now come from White voters. Nearly 90 percent of
the vote that McCain won in 2008, that Romney won in 2012, and that Trump gar-
nered in 2016 E 2020 came from White Americans. The Republican Party is for
almost all intents and purposes a White party. Politics in America is not perfectly
correlated with race, but it seems to be deeply and increasingly intertwined with it.
The end result is that American democracy is now divided more by race than
any other demographic factor. The centrality of race for the vote was evident in
2016 and is illustrated in Figure 3, which provides a snapshot of the roles of race,
class, religion, and other factors in American democracy. Specifically, the figure
shows the gap between different kinds of groups in the likelihood of voting for the
Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. The gap between Whites who gave only
37 percent of their votes to the Democratic candidate and African Americans who
gave 89 percent of their votes to the same candidate was a whopping 51 points.
That is more like a racial chasm than a racial gap. The gap between Whites and
Asian Americans was a robust 42 points; between Whites and Latinos it was a sub-
stantial 38 points.

Those racial gaps far outweighed any of the class divides that the exit polls re-
corded in 2016. The gap by income (seven points), formazione scolastica (four points), E
union membership (five points) all fall far short of the racial divides. Critically, Esso
is important to note that the effects of different measures of class work in different
directions in 2016. Wealthier Americans are more likely than poorer Americans

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

Figura 2
The Changing Racial Composition of the Democratic and Republican
Parties: Non-White Share of the Presidential Vote by Party and Year

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50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1948

1952

1956

1960

1964

1968

1972

1976

1980

1984

Democratic Voters

1988

1992

1996

2004

2000
Republican Voters

2008

Fonte: American National Election Study, Cumulative File.

Figura 3
Race, Class, Religion, and Other Demographic Divides in the 2016
Presidential Contest

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Black vs. W hite
Asian vs. W hite
Latino vs. W hite
Catholic vs. Protestant
U nder 25 vs. O ver 65
U nder $30k vs. O ver $200k
N o Religion vs. Protestant
Jewish vs. Protestant
M ilitary vs. N ot
U nion vs. N ot
M arried vs. N ot
M ale vs. Fe m ale
N o H S vs. Grad

Fonte: National Exit Poll.

2012

2016

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

to vote Republican–a pattern that aligns with traditional class-based theories of
American politics. But Americans with postgraduate degrees are actually less like-
ly than Americans with a high school diploma to favor the Republican candidate.
In other words, increased class status is sometimes associated with the political
left, and sometimes associated with the political right; this pattern repeats across
elections and time, not just in 2016. If I try to add all of the effects of class together
by comparing the votes of wealthy, well-educated, full-time workers to the votes
of lower-income, unemployed, high school dropouts, I find that class plays almost
no net role in the vote.31 Because some class-based factors pushed toward Trump,
and others led toward Clinton, the net effect of being high class was only four
points. Not only does race have a larger impact than class when it comes to Ameri-
cans’ political diversity, it also has a much clearer and more consistent impact. Of
course, as the media has repeatedly highlighted, there are growing class divisions
within the White population, but that does not negate the fact that race more than
class shapes the overall electorate.

IL 2016 racial divides also dwarf divisions by gender (thirteen points), age
(eleven points), marital status (eleven points), or military status (sixteen points).
The only factor that begins to rival race is religion. The gaps between Protestants
and atheists (thirty-one points) and between Protestants and Jews (twenty-five
points) are both quite substantial, but fall somewhat below all of the White–non-
White divides.

The electoral story in 2016 is one in which race was central; but the story in
2016 is also not unique. The numbers for 2020, which are still coming in, reveal a
strikingly similar story. Looking across an array of other recent elections, I found
remarkably similar electoral patterns from the national to the local level. In most
electoral contests, American politics today pits the White majority against the
bulk of the racial and ethnic minority population.

Politics is bound to create division, but when those divisions so closely mirror
racial and ethnic identity, the situation is troubling. With race and party so closely
matching each other, it is perhaps not surprising that hostility between Democrats
and Republicans is increasing. Today, Americans tend to view fellow partisans as
patriotic, well-informed, and altruistic, while they tend to attribute the opposite
characteristics to members of the opposite party. Experiments reveal that partisan
division has become so heated that Democrats and Republicans now regularly and
openly discriminate against each other.32 When our political dividing lines begin
to look a lot like a racial census, larger concerns about inequality, conflict, and dis-
crimination emerge, and we are in danger of being driven apart.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

about the author

Zoltan Hajnal is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San
Diego. He is the author of Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and
Losing in American Politics (2020), White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics
(with Marisa Abrajano, 2015), and Why Americans Don’t Join the Party: Race, Immigra-
zione, and the Failure of Political Parties to Engage the Electorate (with Taeku Lee, 2011).

endnotes

1 The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, 2016 VOTER Survey Full Data Set, Giugno 2016,

https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publications/2016-elections/data.

2 See Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American

Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).

3 See Michael Rivera, The Determinants of State Immigration Policy (Ph.D. diss., University of

California, San Diego, 2015).

4 See Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, “The Transformation of the Republican and
Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.,” Perspectives on Politics 6 (3) (2008): 433–450.
5 See Tom Wong, The Politics of Immigration: Partisanship, Demographic Change, and American

National Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

6 See Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 2011).

7 See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism: 1860–1925, 2nd ed.

(New York: Atheneum, 1985).

8 See Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the

1850S (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

9 See Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, E
Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991). See also Ed-
ward Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of Amer-
ican Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

10 Nicholas A. Valentino and David O. Sears, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race
and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South,” American Journal of Political Sci-
ence 43 (9) (2005).

11 See Michael Tesler, “The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President
Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Race and Racial Attitudes,” American Journal of Po-
litical Science 56 (3) (2012): 690–704.

12 See Michael Tesler and John Sides, “How Political Science Helps Explain the Rise of
Trump: The Role of White Identity and Grievances,” The Washington Post, Marzo 3,
2016.

13 See Adam Enders and Steven Small, “Racial Prejudice Not Populism or Authoritarianism

Predicts Support for Trump over Clinton,” The Washington Post, May 26, 2016.

14 A range of different surveys from the American National Election Study to the Coopera-
tive Congressional Election Study across different election years and different levels of

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150 (2) Spring 2021Zoltan Hajnal

office, from the national to the state level, all show a tight relationship between immi-
gration views and the vote. See Abrajano and Hajnal, White Backlash.

15 Author’s analysis of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, https://cces

.gov.harvard.edu/.

16 Author’s analysis of the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, https://cces

.gov.harvard.edu/.

17 See Zoltan Hajnal and Michael Rivera, “Immigration, Latinos, and White Partisan Poli-
tic: The New Democratic Defection,” American Journal of Political Science 58 (4) (2014):
773–789.

18 See Donald Kinder and Wendy Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American

Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

19 Immigration has mattered beyond race in more recent elections as well. See Marc Hoogeh
and Ruth Dassonneville, “Explaining the Trump Vote: The Effect of Racial Resent-
ment and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments,” PS: Political Science and Politics 51 (3) (2018): 528–
535. They find, Per esempio, that immigration attitudes rivaled racial considerations in
explaining the vote in 2016.

20 The effect of immigration views on party identification is also apparent in two earlier

panel studies from 2000–2004 and 1992–1993.

21 See John Sides, Race, Religion, and Immigration in 2016 (Washington, D.C.: The Democracy

Fund Voter Study Group, 2017).

22 That analysis combines data from the two different data sets that most regularly ask
about attitudes on immigration (The Gallup Poll) and partisanship (The CBS News/
New York Times Poll). For attitudes on immigration, we focused on answers to the ques-
zione: “Should immigration be kept at its present level, increased, or decreased?"
23 The Supreme Court has since struck down Trump’s repeal of DACA. See Department of

Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California 591 US _ (2020).

24 See Rivera, The Determinants of State Immigration Policy.
25 È interessante notare, whereas the size of the Latino population has a consistent, robust effect on
policy, alternate analysis reveals relatively few connections between the size of the un-
documented population or the size of the foreign-born population and state policy.
26 See Ted Brader, Elizabeth Suhay, and Nicholas Valentino, “What Triggers Public Oppo-
sition to Immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat,” American Jour-
nal of Political Science 52 (4) (2008): 959–978.

27 Matthew C. Fellowes and Gretchen Rowe found similar patterns for welfare in “Politics
and the New American Welfare States,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2) (2004):
362–373.

28 There is, Tuttavia, some good news for the Latinx and immigrant population. Our re-
search in White Backlash also finds that once the Latino population share crosses a cer-
tain threshold, policy begins to shift back to the left. California’s recent shift toward
more welcoming immigration policy (including everything from offering undocu-
mented immigrants in-state tuition, drivers’ licenses, and the opportunity to practice
law to multibillion dollar increases in education funding and significantly more lenient
criminal justice policies) provides a clear illustration of this phenomenon. A state that
was once the leader in anti-immigrant policy-making has transformed itself into a lead-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesImmigration & the Origins of White Backlash

er in providing creative, forward-thinking policies on immigration, largely thanks to its
growing immigrant population and its recent shift to majority-minority status.

29 Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson, “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’
America: Perceived Status Threat From the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White
Americans’ Political Ideology,” Psychological Science 25 (6) (2014).

30 See Zoltan Hajnal, Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in Ameri-

can Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

31 To do this analysis and to combine these categories, I used data from the 2016 Coopera-

tive Congressional Election Study.

32 See Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: Nuovo
Evidence on Group Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 59 (3) (2015): 690–707.

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