Perceptions of stereotypically immigrant groups as darker-skinned and politics of immigration in the United States and Britain

ABSTRACT

Recent evidence indicates that anti-immigration attitudes in white-majority societies have a “racial hue” as they at least partially derive from aversion toward prevalent immigrant groups. Building upon this result, I argue that there is variation in the degree to which people think of stereotypically immigrant groups as darker-skinned, and that this variation has implications for attitudes toward immigration. To test these conjectures, I propose an instrument to measure the associations between social groups and light vs. dark skin tone based on the implicit association test architecture. Using original survey studies in the United States and Britain, I demonstrate that respondents in the two countries indeed tend to perceive stereotypically immigrant groups – Hispanics and Muslims – as darker-skinned than stereotypically native ones (Anglos and Christians respectively). Further, individual differences in these perceptions are related to group-specific prejudice, opinions about immigration, and partisan affect.

KEYWORDS:

• Hispanics
• immigration
• implicit association test
• Muslims
• prejudice
• skin color
• stereotypes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this project were presented at the Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Political Psychology, Research on Individuals, Politics, and Society workshop at Vanderbilt University, and several workshops at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to Allison Anoll, Ted Brader, Chinbo Chong, Vince Hutchings, Cindy Kam, Eunji Kim, Don Kinder, Walter Mebane, Fabian Neuner, Angela Ocampo, Mara Ostfeld, John Sides, Stuart Soroka, Steve Utych, Nick Valentino, three anonymous reviewers, and Nadia Brown, the editor of Politics, Groups, and Identities, for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Throughout the paper, I use the term “Hispanic” for consistency since Study 1 employs Hispanic names as the stimuli. Hispanic names were used because the IAT design could not incorporate gender as the third dimension in variation of the stimuli (i.e., display “Latina” for female names and “Latino” for male ones). The gender-neutral term “Latinx” would likely be still unfamiliar to many respondents.

2 These results were obtained in white or white-majority samples. There is evidence that African Americans may express preference for darker-skinned ingroup candidates (Burge, Wamble, and Cuomo 2020).

3 For sample demographics, see Table S1 in Supplementary Material.

4 https://www.millisecond.com/products/inquisit5/weboverview.aspx.

5 For sample demographics, see Table S1 in Supplementary Material.

6 For instance, it may be of interest to investigate the role of racialized physical traits other than skin color, such as physiognomy, or hair texture (Lemi and Brown 2019), in the perceptions stereotypically immigrant groups.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by Angus Campbell Scholars Fund and Garth Taylor Fellowship in Public Opinion at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.