Do Latinos still support immigrant rights activism? Examining Latino attitudes a decade after the 2006 protest wave

ABSTRACT

The historic and primarily Latino 2006 immigrant rights protest wave occurred in response to proposed federal anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437). Research on the unprecedented series of demonstrations suggests that the draconian and racialized nature of the bill helps explain why it incited large-scale collective action. Utilising a new survey with a considerable oversample of Latino respondents, the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), this paper investigates the role that collective identities, racialisation, and social networks play in Latino support for contemporary immigrant rights activism. To do so, we incorporate measures such as linked fate, perceptions of anti-immigrant sentiments, knowing undocumented people, and concerns about immigration enforcement policies. The results of our analysis indicate that some of the same factors that influenced Latino engagement in the 2006 mobilisations, such as identity and racialisation, concerns over enforcement, and social networks, continue to impact Latino support for contentious politics on behalf of the foreign-born. We also find evidence that political party and past protest activity, play a significant role in explaining levels of support for activism. Our results have important implications for understanding how anti-immigrant policies and racialized nativism influence Latino support for contentious politics.

Keywords:

• Immigrant rights
• social movements
• public opinion
• Latino politics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers and editors of this JEMS issue for their valuable feedback and support. We would also like to thank Michael Jones-Correa and Taeku Lee, as well as Geoff Wallace for their comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Suro and Escobar (2006) http://www.pewhispanic.org/2006/07/13/2006-national-survey-of-latinos/.

2 Barreto et al.’s survey found that found that on a scale of 1 to 10, Latinos of Mexican (7.8), Puerto Rican (7.8), Dominican (7.7), Central American (7.3), South American (7.1), and even of Cuban (7.2) descent, all expressed high levels of support for the rallies.

3 The most well known of these temporary concessions was Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program implemented via an executive directive.

4 The survey was composed of questions that 55 teams of researchers designed. Researchers purchased time on the survey to field their content and pooled these resources. This allowed for the fielding of a comprehensive instrument with substantial oversamples of Latino, African-American, and Asian respondents. More information about the CMPS survey can be found here http://www.latinodecisions.com/recent-polls/cmps-2016/.

5 A full list of survey items used in the models is included in the Appendix.

6 A table of descriptive statistics of the variables is included in the Appendix in Table A1.

7 The main dependent variable thus measures attitudes toward immigrant rights activism as Support / Neither support or oppose / Oppose. The three-point measure is utilised because of the necessity to use survey weights and the calculation of substantive effects when utilising survey weights. For robustness, we also ran the regression model using the five-point dependent variable and the statistical results are the same. The results of this alternate model specification are contained in the Appendix in Table A2.

8 We do not include a variable for Spanish language media reliance because the proportion of Latino respondents who rely primarily on Spanish language media in the CMPS sample is small (7.3%). We ran an additional model using a Spanish media reliance variable and the results for this variable are not statistically significant. While we do think there is a relationship between Spanish language media reliance and support for immigrant rights activism given the role of Spanish media in 2006 protests, there are too few CMPS respondents who are Spanish media dominant to appropriately demonstrate this relationship. An examination of raw levels of support for immigrant rights activism indicates that 69% of Spanish media dominant respondents support immigrant rights activism compared to 49% of respondents who are English media dominant.

9 More discussion of the results and potential alternative explanations for what the DV is measuring are contained in Fn. 13 on pg. 14.

10 Respondents of all other national origin groups not specifically controlled thus represent the excluded, or baseline, category. The sample of respondents analysed is entirely Latino respondents.

11 The Latino sample of CMPS is comparable to other large surveys of Latino respondents such as the LNS in 2006 (Fraga et al. 2013). One exception is that the CMPS sample has more female respondents and is slightly skewed towards higher educated Latinos and younger Latinos. To balance for difference between our sample and the Latino adult population, we have utilised survey weights. A post-stratification ranking algorithm was used to balance the categories of age, gender, education, nativity, ancestry, and voter registration, within +/-1 point of the ACS estimates for each racial group. For more information, see http://www.latinodecisions.com/files/1214/8902/9774/cmps_methodology.pdf. A table of descriptive statistics for the variables in this analysis is contained in the Appendix in Table A2.

12 One alternative explanation is that expressed levels of support for activism is actually capturing support for immigration overall. Latino support for pro- immigration policies is considerably higher (over 80%) than the reported levels of support for activism (53%). Thus, while many of the people who support pro-immigration policies may support activism on the issue as well, there is not a one to one overlap with those that support activism. Additionally, one may suggest that Latinos may express the same levels of support for activism overall and they would be similarly supportive of any other type of activism that is not immigrant rights related. In examining Latino support for Black Lives Matter 45% indicated support, while 58% indicated support of LGBT activism, thus there is variation in Latino support for activism on different issues.

13 All analysis conducted using Stata 15.

14 One may wonder whether Latinos who voted for Trump were also less supportive of immigrant rights activism. Trump supporters are less supportive than Clinton voters. Latinos who voted for Clinton overwhelmingly support immigrant rights activism. Whereas, Trump voters had nearly equal percentages of individuals who supported and opposed for immigrant rights activism. This pattern is also true of Latino Republicans. While not all Latinos who voted for Trump are Republicans, the correlation between Latino Republicans and Latino Trump voters in this sample is .63.

15 All values are calculated using the -mchange- command from the SPost software package (Long and Freese 2014). For dichotomous variables, the first difference represents a change from 0 to 1, whereas for continuous variables the estimate shows the first differences as a result from moving from the minimum to the maximum value.