New research from the 2016 National Asian American Survey (NAAS), conducted by RSF authors Karthick Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Lee, Taeku Lee, and Janelle Wong, has recently been featured in the news. In their study, the authors found that in the current presidential election, Asian American voters overwhelmingly prefer Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to Republican candidate Donald Trump. According to the survey, more than twice as many Asian Americans identify as Democrats than as Republicans. As author Karthick Ramakrishnan told the LA Times, the GOP’s “anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh tone and language is a turnoff” to Asian American voters. The results of the NAAS—which examines immigrant and second-generation incorporation, race and ethnic relations and attitudes, and participants’ civic and political participation—have also been featured in the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight.

Karthick Ramkrishnan, Taeku Lee, and Janelle Wong are co-authors of the RSF book Asian American Political Participation (2011). Jennifer Lee is co-author of the RSF books The Asian American Achievement Paradox (2015) and The Diversity Paradox (2012). Both Ramakrishnan and Jennifer Lee were Visiting Scholars at the foundation during the academic year of 2011-2012.

Ramakrishnan, along with co-authors Chris Haynes and Jennifer Merolla, also recently appeared in the media to discuss the findings in their new RSF book Framing Immigrants. In the book, the authors explore how conservative, liberal, and mainstream news outlets frame and discuss undocumented immigrants, and how this framing shapes the public debate on immigration and subsequent policies. In an interview on the Brian Lehrer Show about the current presidential candidates’ immigration platforms, Ramakrishnan outlined differences in Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s framings of immigrants. “Voters become anxious about immigration when candidates like Trump frame immigrants as criminals, even though immigrants are much less likely to commit violent crimes,” Ramakrishnan noted. Yet, as he, Haynes, and Merolla pointed out in CNBC, Clinton could counter this frame by arguing that “Trump's policies of mass deportation would harm the American economy.” In Framing Immigrants, the authors show that that “negative” frames more strongly influence public support for different immigration policies than do positive frames. For instance, survey participants who were exposed to stories portraying immigrants as law-breakers seeking “amnesty” tended to oppose legalization measures. But when mass deportation of undocumented immigrants was framed as a measure that would incur high economic costs, participants were less likely to support it.

Research from Framing Immigrants has also recently been featured in VICE, the New York Times, PBS Newshour, the Washington Post, and ABC News.