Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact : ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS FOR OPPOSITION TO IMMIGRATION

Behavioral scientists have long sought measures of important psychological constructs that avoid response biases and other problems associated with direct reports. Recently, a large number of such indirect, or "implicit," measures have emerged. We review research that has utilized these measures across several domains, including attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes, and discuss their predictive validity, their interrelations, and the mechanisms presumably underlying their operation. Special attention is devoted to various priming measures and the Implicit Association Test, largely due to their prevalence in the literature. We also attempt to clarify several unresolved theoretical and empirical issues concerning implicit measures, including the nature of the underlying constructs they purport to measure, the conditions under which they are most likely to relate to explicit measures, the kinds of behavior each measure is likely to predict, their sensitivity to context, and the construct's potential for change.

In ethnic and racial terms, America is growing rapidly more diverse. Yet attempts to extend racial threat hypotheses to today's immigrants have generated inconsistent results. This article develops the politicized places hypothesis, an alternative that focuses on how national and local conditions interact to construe immigrants as threatening. Hostile political reactions to neighboring immigrants are most likely when communities undergo sudden influxes of immigrants and when salient national rhetoric reinforces the threat. Data from several sources, including twelve geocoded surveys from 1992 to 2009, provide consistent support for this approach. Time-series cross-sectional and panel data allow the analysis to exploit exogenous shifts in salient national issues such as the September 11 attacks, reducing the problem of residential self-selection and other threats to validity. The article also tests the hypothesis using new data on local anti-immigrant policies. By highlighting the interaction of local and national conditions, the politicized places hypothesis can explain both individual attitudes and local political outcomes.