When fear spreads: individual- and group-level predictors of deportation worry among Latino immigrants

ABSTRACT

What shapes Latino immigrants’ worries surrounding deportation? Using five waves of the Latino National Survey, we examine this question by considering immigrants’ own legal status, their social background and the legal vulnerability of their national origin group. We find that while individual legal vulnerability heightens deportation worries, social and group markers also have independent and intersecting associations with immigrants’ worries. Disadvantaged social traits such as lack of English language proficiency and lower levels of education are associated with higher rates of deportation anxiety regardless of legal status, while also differentially shaping the effects of legal status. In addition, while all national origin groups are likely to report worrying about deportation, immigrants from national origin groups at greater risk of deportation tend to worry more, regardless of individual legal status. Finally, decomposition analysis suggests that individual legal status does not have greater explanatory power over deportation fears than social markers or group-level legal vulnerability. Even while being undocumented remains significant in shaping deportation fears, these fears vary widely and systematically within and across legal and social categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Deportation
• fear
• legal status
• immigration enforcement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As shown in the Online Appendix, replicating our analyses excluding the 375 respondents from 2013 produces substantively similar results.

2 For Puerto Rico, we set this ratio to 0.

3 In the Online Appendix, we include supplementary analyses that replace the 1.5-generation indicator variable with years in the U.S. Results are substantively similar.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation Haynes Foundation, the National Science Foundation (DGE-1144087), and the California Center for Population Research at UCLA (CCPR) with training support (T32HD007545) and core support (P2CHD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding sources.