Framing Labels and Immigration Policy Attitudes in the Iowa Caucuses: “Trying to Out-Tancredo Tancredo”

We use an experiment built into a series of surveys of Iowa voters during the 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign to test the effect of differing group framing labels on immigration policy preferences. We find that certain framing labels matter, but only among Republican partisans for whom the immigration issue is important. We also find that issue importance produces more conservative policy preferences for Democrats as well as Republicans. We examine and discuss these results as well as their implications for the immigration debate, the interaction between issue salience and policy preferences, and the theory of political framing in general.     

Divergent framing: The public debate on migration in the Dutch parliament and media, 1995–2004

In this article we reconstruct how the issues of migration and integration have been framed in the Dutch public debate over the last decade. We examine the patterns in both the parliamentary arena and the media and look at similarities and differences between them. On the basis of two contradictory theories, we formulate hypotheses about overlap and differences between the two arenas and diversity within them. Our results reveal incongruence in framing between them. After 9/11, however, the framing in which Islam is perceived as a threat to Western society becomes dominant in both arenas. Furthermore, we do not find any proof of the idea that the media act as a civic forum, with a high diversity of framing. Framing in parliament, instead, is far more diverse. In contrast to the hegemonic framing in the media, the Islam-as-threat frame is actively contested in the political realm.     

Does border enforcement deter unauthorized immigration? The case of Mexican migration to the United States of America

This paper asks whether the migration decisions of unauthorized Mexican immigrants to the USA have been influenced by stronger US border enforcement efforts since 1993 that have sharply increased the physical risk and financial cost of illegal immigration. These measures were supposed to have decreased the probability of successful entry, thereby lowering the expected benefits of migration. We carried out a logistic regression analysis of data from a recent survey of 603 returned migrants and potential first‐time migrants in rural Mexico. Our findings indicate that tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA. Political restrictions on immigration are far outweighed by economic and family‐related incentives to migrate. An alternative, labor‐market approach to immigration control with higher probability of effectiveness is outlined.     

The Implications of Framing Effects for Citizen Competence

Social scientists have documented framing effects in a wide range of contexts, including surveys, experiments, and actual political campaigns. Many view work on framing effects as evidence of citizen incompetence—that is, evidence that citizens base their preferences on arbitrary information and/or are subject to extensive elite manipulation. Yet, we continue to lack a consensus on what a framing effect is as well as an understanding of how and when framing effects occur. In this article, I examine (1) the different ways that scholars have employed the concepts of framing and framing effects, (2) how framing effects may violate some basic criteria of citizen competence, and (3) what we know about how and when framing effects work. I conclude that while the evidence to date suggests some isolated cases of incompetence, the more general message is that citizens use frames in a competent and well-reasoned manner.     

Variation in policy success: radical right populism and migration policy

How do radical right populist parties influence government policies in their core issue of immigration? This article provides a systematic analysis of the direct and indirect effects of radical right anti-immigration parties on migration policy reforms in 17 West European countries from 1990 to 2014. Insights from migration policy theory serve to explain variations in the migration policy success of the radical right. While previous studies mostly treat migration policy as uniform, it is argued that this approach neglects the distinct political logics of immigration and integration policy. This article reveals significant variations in policy success by policy area. While immigration policies have become more liberal despite the electoral success of the radical right, when the radical right is in government office it enacts more restrictions in integration policies. Accordingly, anti-immigrant mobilisation is more likely to influence immigrants’ rights than their actual numbers.     

Public pensions and return migration

In a median-voter framework with pensions and immigration we show that only few unskilled immigrants are allowed into the country because the unskilled native median voter is concerned with negative effects on his or her wage, but not with the positive effects to other groups in society. When return migration is allowed for, the median voter is more willing to accept immigration because he or she can shift some of the burden to future generations.     

The lasting impact of adolescence on left-right identification: Cohort replacement and intracohort change in associations with issue attitudes

This study examined how the ideological correlates of left-right identification in the Netherlands changed between 1980 and 2008, and whether these changes were driven by cohort replacement. Analyses on repeated cross-sectional data revealed an increasing association with immigration and a decreasing association with redistribution, secularism, and civil liberties. Cohort differences were found for cultural attitudes: Secularism was most important for voters who were adolescent between 1917 and 1960, while civil liberties were most important for the 1960–1980 cohort and immigration was relatively important for the 1980–2008 cohort. Consequently, over-time changes in the importance of cultural issues, but not redistribution, were partly driven by cohort replacement. This indicates that the left-right distinction is partly shaped by circumstances during voters' adolescent years.     

The evolution of elite framing following enactment of legislation

The study of policy framing enables the investigation of how elites conceptualize policy issues. While the dominant investigative work on elite framing has been within the mass media, we demonstrate the utility of an elite framing approach in a political institution, the U.S. Congress. We argue for moving to a ??life-cycle?? approach to policy framing that recognizes the evolution of elite framing attempts as implementation of a law deviates from its legislative intent, basing our approach out of the issue-attention cycle theory put forth by Downs (Public Interest 28:38?C50, 1972). Framing efforts by policy advocates do not end after legislation has been enacted or policy changed. Elites who have been unsuccessful in achieving their policy aims continue to advocate for their preferred outcomes by altering their framing strategies. We demonstrate this by applying evolutionary factor analysis to investigate 10 Congressional committee hearings held between 1957 and 2006 pertaining to federal funding for the Garrison Diversion Unit in North Dakota. From the perspective of proponents of diverting water from the Missouri River, how the Congressional debate over the Unit progressed constituted policy regression. This is reflected in the evolution of elite framing over the period studied. Our analysis uncovers the emergence of four evolutionary frames. Initial frames emphasized the benefits to be derived from water diversion, while subsequent frames reflected a more defensive posture emphasizing the limited harm that water diversion would cause. This research demonstrates the consequences of legislative implementation delay for elite framing attempts.     

Revealing preferences: Does deliberation increase ideological awareness among the less well educated?

Research suggests that the rightist discourse on immigration appeals to left‐leaning citizens with lower levels of education. The opposite is, however, not true for right‐wing voters with lower educational levels, and this asymmetry leaves left‐wing parties at a disadvantage compared with the right on immigration and integration issues. Deliberative theory promises that discussion, information and reflection can promote a more balanced political discussion and a more enlightened citizen. This article assesses the extent to which deliberative polling increases the ideological awareness of citizens with lower educational levels. More specifically, it gauges the extent to which especially less well educated left‐wing voters – those whose attitudes research finds to be particularly out of tune with their ideological predispositions regarding immigration and integration – adjust their attitudes as a consequence of deliberate exposure to informational input and the presentation of two‐sided arguments. Use is made of unique data generated during the first European‐wide deliberative polling project, ‘EuroPolis’, held in 2009. The results indicate that less well educated left‐wing voters indeed have slightly more negative attitudes towards immigrants than leftist voters with secondary or post‐secondary educational levels. Turning to the micro‐mechanisms of attitude change in a deliberative setting, the analyses show that both levels of education and ideological predispositions play a role in the extent to which participants of the deliberative poll adjust their attitudes. In three out of four models, evidence is found that less well educated left‐leaning citizens are indeed most likely to adjust their attitudes on immigration and integration after being presented with a more balanced discussion of the topic.     

Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact

What explains variation in individuals’ opposition to immigration? While scholars have consistently shown cultural concerns to be strong predictors of opposition, findings regarding the labor‐market competition hypothesis are highly contested. To help understand these divergent results, we distinguish between the prevalence and conditional impact of determinants of immigration attitudes. Leveraging a targeted sampling strategy of high‐technology counties, we conduct a study of Americans’ attitudes toward H‐1B visas. The plurality of these visas are occupied by Indian immigrants, who are skilled but ethnically distinct, enabling us to measure a specific skill set (high technology) that is threatened by a particular type of immigrant (H‐1B visa holders). Unlike recent aggregate studies, our targeted approach reveals that the conditional impact of the relationship in the high‐technology sector between economic threat and immigration attitudes is sizable. However, labor‐market competition is not a prevalent source of threat and therefore is generally not detected in aggregate analyses.     

Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States

Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration. We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower levels of immigration. The underpinnings of individual attitudes are similar in all countries and immigration attitudes are surprisingly unrelated to country-level differences in GDP, unemployment and the number and composition of the foreign born. An implication of these findings is that acceptance of higher levels of immigration, deemed by many to be an economic need, will require both more selective immigration policies and an emphasis on the cultural assimilation of newcomers.     

The Discourse of the Extreme Right and Its Ideological Implications: The Case of the Alleanza nazionale on Immigration

Against the background of research on Italian parliamentary debates on immigration, ter Wal looks at the ideological positions of the extreme-right Alleanza nazionale (AN) concerning both immigration and integration policy. In order to unravel the ideological implications she focuses on examples of various rhetorical strategies enacted in speeches by several of the party's MPs: including stategies of self- and other-presentation, and of justification and causal explanation. This analysis shows how the AN manages to propagate an ideology of ethnic nationalism that eschews the egalitarian norms and cultural pluralism necessary for full participation by migrants. The AN's transformation and re-interpretation of the meaning of the key values of equality andsolidarietàfunction as a justification for the restriction of migrants' rights. Speakers shift the perspective from immigrants' problems to the socio-economic problems of Italians in order to recommend a policy of 'the own people first'. While the AN's discourse thus continues to build on traditional extreme-right beliefs and claims, on the other hand it also espouses New Right ideologies of cultural relativism. Moreover, unlike that of radical-right parties, the AN's discourse does not express blatant forms of ethnic prejudice in the form of stereotypical beliefs and negative representations of immigrants' personal characteristics, nor does it blame immigrants, who are rather represented, and sympathized with, as victims. The moderation of and internal contradictions in its discourse makes the AN difficult     

Apartheid Policing: examining the US migrant labour system through a South African Lens

This article draws a parallel between the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the post-IRCA immigration regime in the USA. I argue that both regimes were organised around Apartheid Policing, which may be defined as a legal process consisting of three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: differentiation of migrants into non-citizen insiders with legal residence rights and non-citizen outsiders without them; stabilisation of migrants as permanent or long-term residents, enabling the growth of the migrant workforce; and marginalisation of migrants as politically vulnerable outsiders, including exploitation at work. But the two regimes were supported by different political and ideological apparatuses. While placing a disproportionate burden on Latino migrants, the post-IRCA immigration regime differed from the Apartheid regime in that it was not organised around an explicit racial hierarchy, and offered non-citizens a greater array of rights. As a result, Apartheid Policing under the post-IRCA immigration regime is potentially more politically sustainable.     

Local labour market competition and radical right voting: Evidence from France

How do the economic effects of immigration affect radical right support? The evidence in support of the labour market competition theory — which posits that the economic threat posed by immigration to jobs and wages leads to radical right voting — has been mixed. On the one hand, individual-level surveys underreport economic drivers because of social desirability bias. On the other hand, contextual studies show contradictory findings due to an over-reliance on units of analysis that are too aggregated to meaningfully capture the competitive threat posed by immigrants. This paper identifies the influence of labour market competition on radical right voting at a local level in contexts where native workers are directly affected by the arrival of immigrants who have similar or higher skillsets. Using an original longitudinal dataset of fine-grained municipal electoral, demographic and economic data from France over the 2002–2017 period, the paper provides empirical evidence of local contextual influences of economic competition between natives and immigrants of any skillset. Under local conditions of material deprivation, measured by the local unemployment rate, the effect of labour market competition on municipalities’ radical right vote share is amplified. Moreover, higher radical right support is observed in municipalities with a higher share of any one of the following groups: low-skilled natives, medium-skilled immigrants or high-skilled immigrants. This supports the hypothesis that immigrants with higher qualifications are compelled to accept lower-skilled jobs, and are thus perceived as a competitive threat to low-skilled natives. By reconciling radical right contextual studies and research on the political economy of immigration policies, this paper highlights the importance of a local analysis in detecting the effect of labour market competition on radical right support. This paper also explains why some local areas are more prone to radical right support than others over time.     

Who Said What? The Effects of Source Cues in Issue Frames

Drawing on previous research concerning the role that source cues play in political information processing, we examine whether an ideological identity match between the source of a framed message and the respondent moderates framing effects. We test our hypotheses in two experiments concerning attitudes toward a proposed rally by the Ku Klux Klan. In Experiment 1 (N = 274), we test our hypothesis in a simple issue framing experiment. We find that framing effects occur for strong identifiers only when there is a match between the ideology of the speaker and respondent. In Experiment 2 (N = 259), we examine whether matched frames resonate equally well when individuals are simultaneously exposed to competing frames. The results from this experiment provide mixed support for our hypotheses. The results from our studies suggest that identity matching is an important factor to consider in future framing research.     

Rethinking international migration: a review and critique

A new style of international migration, temporary and often illegal immigration in order to work, began to emerge after World War II. Many countries initiated immigration policies that gave the appearance of control, while their back doors remained open and, possibly, unclosable. In the US, it is slowly becoming obvious that foreign workers cannot be used as a temporary labor force at will. 2 usual theories of migration are the classical and the conflicts schools. The classical school presents migration as a rational, economic act that leads to economic adjustment between sending and receiving countries. The conflict school, often Marxist, views migration as an unequal process that leads to the inclusion of developing countries into the world capitalist system and to a widenin gap between rich and poor countries. The convergence of these 2 theories leads to the idea that although migration may be a survival strategy of individuals and households, it is also determined by a country's integration in the world economic system. The author reviews several books on immigration theory, which appreciate the complexity and worldwide character of migration; indicate that migration patterns are persistent; and support the view that migration is an economic, social, and political problem; and recommend that policies must be integrated and address the entire issue.     

Controlling immigration? How regulations affect migration flows

The aim of this article is to investigate whether or not and how immigration policies affect immigration flows. Such policy impacts have hardly been investigated so far as the necessary data is lacking. For the first time, two new datasets are combined to systematically measure immigration policies and bilateral migration flows for 33 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) destination countries from over 170 countries of origin over the period 1982–2010. The study finds that immigration policies have an important effect on immigration flows and thus that states are able to control their borders. To some extent the control capacities depend on other factors in attracting or deterring immigrants. The article shows that the deterrence effect of restrictive immigration policies increases when unemployment rates are high. It appears that, in these contexts, states start to care more about effectively protecting their national economy. Moreover, policies are more effective for migrant groups from former colonies or when the stock of this group is already high in a destination country. In these circumstances, information on border regulations are more easily disseminated, which in turn makes them more effective.     

Stereotype Threat and Race of Interviewer Effects in a Survey on Political Knowledge

Social desirability is generally thought to underlie the propensity for survey respondents to tailor their answers to what they think would satisfy or please the interviewer. While this may in fact be the underlying motivation, especially on attitudinal and opinion questions, social desirability does not seem to be an adequate explanation for interviewer effects on factual questions. Borrowing from the social psychology literature on stereotype threat, we test an alternative account of the race-of-interviewer effects. Stereotype threat maintains that the pressure to disconfirm and to avoid being judged by negative and potentially degrading stereotypes interferes with the processing of information. We argue that the survey context contains many parallels to a testing environment in which stereotype threat might alter responses to factual questions. Through a series of framing experiments in a public opinion survey and the reliance on the sensitivity to the race of the interviewer, our results are consistent with expectations based on a theory of "stereotype threat." African American respondents to a battery of questions about political knowledge get fewer answers right when interviewed by a white interviewer than when interviewed by an African American interviewer. The observed differences in performance on the political knowledge questions cannot be accounted for by differences in the educational background or gender of the respondents.     

Party competition over decentralisation: The influence of ideology and electoral incentives on issue emphasis

Under what conditions is decentralisation a salient issue for state‐wide political parties? It is argued in this article that the extent to which state‐wide parties emphasise decentralisation depends on their strategic considerations: on their overall ideology, on the electoral incentives created by the context in which they compete, and on the interaction between the two. The results of the analysis of party manifestos in 31 countries since 1945 are as follows. First, parties that pay greater attention to cultural matters relative to economic matters tend to talk more about decentralisation. Second, the systemic salience of decentralisation also encourages parties to talk more about decentralisation. Third, the larger the regionally based ethnic groups within a country, the more salience all state‐wide political parties will attach to decentralisation. Finally, only parties that put greater relative emphasis on cultural matters tend to respond to the electoral threat of regionalist parties. The influence of territorial diversity on the salience of decentralisation thus works through two channels and is partly conditioned by political parties’ ideological profile.     

Putting it Right? The Labour Party's Big Shift on Immigration Since 2010

Under pressure from voters, and from other parties, Europe's centre‐left has had to re‐evaluate its position on migration. The UK Labour party is no exception. Public concern about large‐scale immigration clearly contributed to its heavy defeat at the 2010 general election. Since then it has been slowly but surely hardening its stance on the issue, although this is by no means unprecedented: while the rise of UKIP may have upped the ante in recent months, Labour has a long history of adjusting policy in this area so as to remain competitive with its main rival, the Conservative party. Labour is now asking itself whether it will be possible to do this without challenging one of the fundamental precepts of EU membership—the right of free movement of people. Whatever the result of this internal debate between the party's ‘beer drinkers’ and its ‘wine drinkers’, Labour may still have difficulty in neutralising immigration as an issue since, for the most part, it continues to insist on giving an essentially economic answer to what for many voters is actually a cultural question.