Q&A: Matthew Wright’s (with Morris Levy) Immigration and the American Ethos (Cambridge University Press)
What are the major themes and takeaways in Immigration and the American Ethos?
What is it that Americans want from their immigration policy, and why? A widespread consensus has them primarily driven by tribalistic notions of “us” and “them.” We challenge this view, arguing that, for the most part, it is Americans’ commitments to “creedal” values that guides their opinions in this domain. The values we identify – individualism, egalitarianism, humanitarianism, and support for the rule of law – are central to Americans’ beliefs about what the political community owes to its aspiring members and what they owe in return. These perceptions of “civic fairness” are the dominant guideposts by which most Americans navigate immigration controversies most of the time.
Throughout the book, we make three major claims about civic fairness values: 1) they help us explain nuance in Americans’ immigration policy attitudes that prevailing group-centrist attitudes cannot; 2) many empirical patterns used to support group-centrist theories are better-explained by civic fairness values, and; 3) when civic fairness values and group loyalties come into conflict, the former exerts a stronger pull for most Americans, most of the time.
Where would you situate Immigration and the American Ethos in the larger field of Migration Studies? How do you see it contributing to contemporary debates?
Recent academic books on immigration in the U.S. fall into three broad categories. The first, which has strong footholds in both sociology and political science, traces back at least to Milton Gordon’s seminal Assimilation in American Life (1964) and seeks to understand patterns of socio-political integration among immigrant populations. Some work, such as Alba & Nee’s Remaking the American Mainstream (2003) emphasizes large-scale historical demographic change. Others, such as Portes and Rumbaut’s Immigrant America (2006) and Vigdor’s From Immigrants to Americans (2011) tackle more immediate factors related immigrants’ social and economic background. Finally, some of this work – for example Bloemraad’s Becoming a Citizen (2006), Ramakrishnan’s Democracy in Immigrant America (2005), and Wong’s Democracy’s Promise (2006) – tackles immigrant incorporation from the standpoint of political institutions.
A second strand of literature could be classified as “political development” or “policy history”, and seeks to explain the historic evolution of immigration policy in the U.S. Examples include (but are not limited to) Fuchs’ The American Kaleidoscope (1990), Gimpel and Edwards’ The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform (1999), Martin’s A Nation of Immigrants (2011), Pickus’ True Faith and Allegiance (2005), Smith’s Civic Ideals (1997), Tichenor’s Dividing Lines (2002), and Zolberg’s A Nation by Design (2006). While emphasis varies, most of these works explain policy developments through some combination of political institutions and actors, playing against the backdrop of American “political culture”.
A third, which arguably traces back to John Higham’s Strangers in the Land (1955: 2008), includes books on “nativism” and ethnocentrism in public opinion. Some books in this area, for example Schrag’s Not Fit For Our Society (2010) or Chavez’ The Latino Threat (2008), make their arguments drawing from politics and society in a holistic way. More relevant to our purposes, however, is the large body of work that analyzes public opinion using modern statistical techniques, with some key examples being Citrin and Sears’ American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2014), Kinder and Kam’s Us Against Them (2009), Masuoka and Junn’s The Politics of Belonging (2013), Sniderman et. al’s The Outsider (2000), Sniderman and Hagendoorn’s When Ways of Life Collide (2007), Schildraut’s Press One For English (2005) and Americanism in the Twenty-First Century (2011), Theiss-Morse’s Who Counts as an American? (2009), and Wong’s Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics (2010).
Our book says relatively little about immigrant incorporation, but addresses the latter two streams much more directly. As noted above, the “political development” literature pays virtually no attention to public opinion as a driving factor. On the other hand, work on anti-immigrant sentiment in public opinion downplays the multifaceted nature of immigration policy attitudes themselves, explanatory factors outside of “social identities” broadly construed, and barely touches the question of how public opinion translates to public policy. We intend to address the gaps in both of these literatures, and serve as a much-needed (and heretofore absent) bridge between them.
What was the research process like for Immigration and the American Ethos?
We have been working on this book since roughly 2012. Over that time, we’ve slowly accumulated three different kinds of evidence: 1) a comprehensive collection of U.S. public opinion surveys conducted on immigration-related topics since 1965; 2) Almost two decades’ worth (2000-2016) of news articles from major newspapers on immigrants and immigrations; 3) a series of bespoke surveys containing experiments designed to test theoretical ideas about motivation.
By 2016 or so, this evidence had been marshalled into various papers, chapters, and, ultimately, a working manuscript. At this point, we solicited feedback from experts around the world. Absorbing and incorporating this feedback into extensive re-framing and re-writing occupied the time remaining until publication.
Do you have any future plans to continue this research project?
We have in mind two major projects that follow logically from this one. One is a broadly comparative analysis of what citizens in immigrant-receiving democracies expect in terms of immigrants’ integration and why. This project would isolate a particular set of values distinct from what we looked at in the book; in the main, it would ask what (and how) people think about questions of cultural rights. In terms of evidence, we would apply many of the same techniques used in our book, but scaled up over many countries in order to catch cross-country variation in macro-politics.
Another is a U.S.-based project on framing and persuasion. There, we would pick up on the possibilities outlined in the book and ask whether or not immigration attitudes are vulnerable to information and, if so, what kinds of information and with how long-lasting an effect?
