Exit polls indicate that Asian Americans and Latinos are increasingly likely to vote for Democratic candidates. One possibility is that anti-immigration positions and rhetoric among Republican candidates have driven the shift. However, the individual-level mechanisms underpinning this shift among these immigrant groups remain unclear. Political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Efrén Pérez and psychologist Cheryl Kaiser will assess the implications of elite rhetoric on immigration and related issues on the political attitudes and behaviors of Asian Americans and Latinos.
Books
Framing Immigrants
News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy
About This Book
Winner of the 2019 Western Social Science Association Best Book Award
“Immigration is a topic that frequently frustrates social scientists: we revere careful data analysis but such analysis seems to have little impact on popular perspectives and public policy. Along comes this gem of a volume to help us understand why: frames matter as much as facts. Drawing on a wealth of research as well as their own analysis of media content and opinion surveys, the authors offer a remarkably nuanced view of the cues and wordings that shift public attitudes to be more or less favorably disposed to immigrants and immigration reform. With results that are sometimes surprising but always informative, Framing Immigrants will be required reading for anyone hoping to break through America’s immigration policy stalemate.”
—MANUEL PASTOR, professor of sociology, American studies, and ethnicity and director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, University of Southern California
“Immigration and immigrants are topics about which many people have strong opinions paired with misinformation or no knowledge. Thus media framing can have an outsize impact, for both good and ill. Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan do a terrific job of sorting out what impact the media have on the politics of immigration, when, how, why, and to what effect. An exemplary piece of research.”
—JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
“Framing Immigrants delivers an authoritative account of the power of frames. Combining content analysis of news coverage with original survey experiments, the authors show that not only do frames differ starkly across news organizations in ways that reveal their political stripes, but also that frames matter. The ways in which the media frames immigrants—and especially unauthorized immigrants—significantly affects public opinion, preferences, support for the Dream Act, the deportation of unauthorized immigrants, and comprehensive immigration reform. Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan take the readers along a compelling and surprising journey, and provide a rich, interdisciplinary resource that will inspire future generations of immigration researchers.”
—JENNIFER LEE, Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
While undocumented immigration is controversial, the general public is largely unfamiliar with the particulars of immigration policy. Given that public opinion on the topic is malleable, to what extent do mass media shape the public debate on immigration? In Framing Immigrants, political scientists Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan explore how conservative, liberal, and mainstream news outlets frame and discuss undocumented immigrants. Drawing from original voter surveys, they show that how the media frames immigration has significant consequences for public opinion and has implications for the passage of new immigration policies.
The authors analyze media coverage of several key immigration policy issues—including mass deportations, comprehensive immigration reform, and measures focused on immigrant children, such as the DREAM Act—to chart how news sources across the ideological spectrum produce specific “frames” for the immigration debate. In the past few years, liberal and mainstream outlets have tended to frame immigrants lacking legal status as “undocumented” (rather than “illegal”) and to approach the topic of legalization through human-interest stories, often mentioning children. Conservative outlets, on the other hand, tend to discuss legalization using impersonal statistics and invoking the rule of law. Yet, regardless of the media’s ideological positions, the authors’ surveys show that “negative” frames more strongly influence public support for different immigration policies than do positive frames. For instance, survey participants who were exposed to language portraying immigrants as law-breakers seeking “amnesty” tended to oppose legalization measures. At the same time, support for legalization was higher when participants were exposed to language referring to immigrants living in the United States for a decade or more.
Framing Immigrants shows that despite heated debates on immigration across the political aisle, the general public has yet to form a consistent position on undocumented immigrants. By analyzing how the media influences public opinion, this book provides a valuable resource for immigration advocates, policymakers, and researchers.
CHRIS HAYNES is assistant professor of political science at the University of New Haven.
JENNIFER MEROLLA is professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside
S. KARTHICK RAMAKRISHNAN is professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside.
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Books
Hard Bargains
The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court
About This Book
Winner of the 2017 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology
“In this timely and engaging book, Mona Lynch exposes and examines how draconian federal drug laws operate on the ground. Drawing upon extensive and meticulous research, Lynch paints a disturbing portrait of a flawed system of justice in which Congress has provided remarkable power to prosecutors to induce guilty pleas in drug cases by threatening additional charges that in many cases would double or triple the sentence imposed after conviction at trial. The failure of prosecutors to exercise discretion is matched by the inability of judges to do so, because decades-long sentences are usually mandated by Congress itself. Original, accessible, and critically important, Hard Bargains is a must-read for scholars, lawmakers, lawyers, and citizens interested in achieving more proportional and equitable federal drug policies.”
—KATE STITH, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, Yale Law School
“Mona Lynch demonstrates convincingly how changes in U.S. sentencing and drug laws have concentrated the power to punish in the hands of prosecutors. Through on-the-ground research in three contrasting districts, Hard Bargains portrays region-specific ways in which such power is deployed. Weakened due process and the destruction of myriad lives, especially among African American men, is the outcome everywhere. This thoroughly researched and most readable book reveals the urgency of law reform.”
—JOACHIM J. SAVELSBERG, professor of sociology and law, Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair, University of Minnesota
The convergence of tough-on-crime politics, stiffer sentencing laws, and jurisdictional expansion in the 1970s and 1980s increased the powers of federal prosecutors in unprecedented ways. In Hard Bargains, social psychologist Mona Lynch investigates the increased power of these prosecutors in our age of mass incarceration. Lynch documents how prosecutors use punitive federal drug laws to coerce guilty pleas and obtain long prison sentences for defendants—particularly those who are African American—and exposes deep injustices in the federal courts.
As a result of the War on Drugs, the number of drug cases prosecuted each year in federal courts has increased fivefold since 1980. Lynch goes behind the scenes in three federal court districts and finds that federal prosecutors have considerable discretion in adjudicating these cases. Federal drug laws are wielded differently in each district, but with such force to overwhelm defendants’ ability to assert their rights. For drug defendants with prior convictions, the stakes are even higher since prosecutors can file charges that incur lengthy prison sentences—including life in prison without parole. Through extensive field research, Lynch finds that prosecutors frequently use the threat of extremely severe sentences to compel defendants to plead guilty rather than go to trial and risk much harsher punishment. Lynch also shows that the highly discretionary ways in which federal prosecutors work with law enforcement have led to significant racial disparities in federal courts. For instance, most federal charges for crack cocaine offenses are brought against African Americans even though whites are more likely to use crack. In addition, Latinos are increasingly entering the federal system as a result of aggressive immigration crackdowns that also target illicit drugs.
Hard Bargains provides an incisive and revealing look at how legal reforms over the last five decades have shifted excessive authority to federal prosecutors, resulting in the erosion of defendants’ rights and extreme sentences for those convicted. Lynch proposes a broad overhaul of the federal criminal justice system to restore the balance of power and retreat from the punitive indulgences of the War on Drugs.
MONA LYNCH is Professor of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine.
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Over the past two decades, scientific arguments for the influence of genes on illness, personality, intelligence, criminality, and many other characteristics have increased significantly. Yet, we know little about what the public thinks about these matters and the connections they draw between such ideas and politics.
The principal source of survey data on public opinion and political engagement is the American National Election Study (ANES). However, throughout its long history, the ANES sampling frame has consisted solely of eligible voters. Political scientists James McCann and Michael Jones-Correa have argued that this renders the archive much less useful for conducting research on immigrants, given that more than half of all foreign-born adults are not American citizens, and are thus barred from voting.
Over 4.5 million U.S.-born citizen children have at least one undocumented immigrant parent. In California alone, 13 percent of K–12 grade students have an undocumented parent. Many undocumented parents struggle in low-skill, low-wage jobs with onerous working conditions. They are likely to have low levels of educational attainment, high poverty rates, and limited access to services, as well as fear of deportation and familial separation—all of which can undermine their children’s wellbeing.
Findings: Attitudinal Policy Feedback and the Affordable Care Act; Julianna Pacheco, University of Iowa
Findings: Policy Making Politics? The Mass Political Impact of Medicaid Expansions; Joshua D. Clinton, Vanderbilt University, and Michael W. Sances, University of Memphis