Immigrants, Intersectionality and the Politics of Substantive Representation

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we develop a theory of intersectional substantive representation of and by immigrant communities grounded in two concepts: representational orientation to constituents and representational activity to achieve goals. We argue that Asian American women and Latinas are more likely than Latinos and Asian American men to hold an “embedded” orientation to politics, and view community networks and ties as deeply intertwined with the way they frame their identities and goals as representatives. We test our theoretical expectations regarding formal legislative processes by analyzing bill sponsorship by Asian American and Latina/o Democrats serving in state legislatures from 2014–2017, and draw on a set of interviews with Latina/o and Asian American legislators to argue that our findings account for a wider range of experiences related to overlapping group identities than previous scholarship focused on race and gender alone.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrants
• intersectionality
• representation
• state legislatures
• women of color

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Ivy Cargile, and Eric Juenke and participants in the Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration Consortium for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. The authors are also grateful to the Asian American and Latina/o legislators, and the staff of their national constituent organizations, who shared their time and insights with us as part of the data collection process.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2022.2007466.

Notes

1. This analysis treats gender as binary, largely because in our interviews and prior research, nearly all of the legislators we have spoken with expressed their genders as women or men. These observations also facilitated our decision to refer to individuals who have acknowledged ancestry in Latin America as Latina or Latino. These choices are specific to this article’s focus on political elites and their self-identification patterns.

2. Among legislators serving from 2014–2017, 28%of Asian American legislators were born outside of the United States, as were 18% of Latina/o legislators (GRACE).

3. For brevity, we refer to legislators who are Asian American or Latina or Latino as immigrant or immigrant community legislators. This use of the term immigrant is intended to be expansive and reflect that large proportions of both racial groups are made up of first-generation immigrants, and that racialized politics targeting these groups is often focused on immigration and nativity. Using the term immigrant in this case does not imply foreign born status. Later in the analysis, we also use the term non-immigrant when referring to a comparison group of white and Black legislators, due to the preponderance of native-born members of those groups in the population and in legislatures.

4. Hardy-Fanta et al. (2016) have a helpful discussion of the political science literature on this concept, which they call “connectedness.”

5. While the empirical analysis in this paper focuses on Democrats, it is worth noting that commitments to broad social groups are likely refracted through the lens of partisanship when legislators form their policy goals. However, testing the interaction of partisanship with social group memberships for these groups of legislators is beyond the scope of this paper, in part because there are so few cases of Republican or Independent representatives among Asian American and Latina/o legislators, particularly among women.

6. Reconfirming a common finding in research on Latina/os in the resident population (Vargas, Sanchez, and Juárez 2017) and in elite politics (Brown, Jones, and Becker 2018; Odem and Browne 2014; Phillips 2021).

7. Drawing on Browne and Odem (2012), we argue that “Latinos experience racializing processes that homogenize a diverse population, institutionalize categories in a status hierarchy, and unevenly distribute resources along those lines.” We are specifically not making any claims about perceptions of linked fate among Latina/os and Asian Americans in legislatures.

8. Given our theoretical emphasis on the multidimensional nature of immigrant identity, it may at first appear to be an awkward choice to delineate certain bills as “about” immigration only, when we clearly agree with widespread evidence in the literature that race and gender inform immigrant identities and immigrant policies. At the same time, we would disagree that immigration bills are, for example, a subset of race bills, even though immigrants are racialized in U.S. politics. Immigration and immigrant-related policies are engaging racialized and gendered social structures and beliefs in a way that is distinct from, but related to policies specifically mentioning a racial group or a gender group. We believe our strategy of identifying mentions, instead of a primary bill topic, is the best way to resolve this tension and facilitate a quantitative analysis of data whose bounds may at times be more or less solid. For more on approaches to this type of intersectional empirical analysis, see Hancock (2007).

9. In Reingold, Haynie, and Widner (2020), the author’s conduct a somewhat similar analysis based on a single year of state legislative bills, in a limited subset of states. Their outcome measure is whether or not legislators sponsored at least one single-axis or additive/multiple axis bill. Given how limited some legislators are in being able to sponsor bills focused on a single issue in any given session, and how unlimited others in different chambers are, we instead elected to design a measure that indicates what proportion of legislative activity over several sessions includes mention of these key issues.

10. Testing gender as a standalone variable is incongruent with the intersectional approach we utilize in this analysis. For example, if we wanted to test for a “gender” effect, we could construct a model that includes all immigrant legislators and a dummy independent variable for female. However, whatever the results in that model, they would tell us very little about two groups of women who are gendered in ways that are specific to their racial and immigrant identities. In this analysis, gender is inextricably linked to other dimensions of identity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Dyogi Phillips

Christian Dyogi Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. Her research is focused on the intersection of race, gender and immigration in American politics, and uses intersectional frameworks to study the political incorporation and representation of immigrant communities.

Paru Shah

Paru Shah is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Patrick Vossler

Patrick Vossler is a statistics Ph.D. candidate in the Data Sciences and Operations department in the Marshall School of Business.