[On a topic from a recent thread....This is the (very long) abstract of a paper presented at this month's American Political Science Association annual meeting.]
Foreign Language Exposure, Cultural Threat, and Opposition to Immigration
Ben Newman Stony Brook University-Department of Political Science
Charles S. Taber Stony Brook University - Department of Political Science
Todd Hartman affiliation not provided to SSRN
APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper
Abstract: In the contemporary U.S. few Americans live in towns, regions, or states unaffected by immigration. To get just a crude sense of this, U.S. census data reveals that 18 states experienced a growth in the percent of foreign born residents from 1990 to 20061 of more than 5 percentage points, with Arizona and Nevada experiencing growth rates as high as 7.3 and 10.3 percentage points. Across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the average growth of the foreign born populations was about 3.5 percentage points. Accompanying this, nearly every state during this time experienced growth in their Hispanic and non-English speaking populations.
Historically, with immigration come the prejudice, hostility, and resentment of members of the host country toward members of immigrant groups. A popular object of inquiry in the social sciences is the exploration of the causes of these negative reactions to immigration. A prominent framework for theorizing and empirically assessing the sources of attitudes within the public opinion research on immigration is the focus on the threats posed by immigrants, and more specifically, the comparison between those threats conceptualized as realistic, materially-based, and economic on the one hand, and those conceived as immaterial, identity-oriented, and symbolic on the other hand. Initially, economic type threats, such as job competition, downward pressures on wages, and consumption of government services, were thought to be the primary drivers of opposition to immigration (Olzak, 1992). Economic threat based explanations came under attack when several key studies found that various measures of economic self interest either did not play a significant role in shaping attitudes toward immigration or exerted a modest effect compared to those exerted by measures of symbolic or cultural threat (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior, 2004).
In line with observed trends in public opinion studies of other individual political attitudes (Citrin and Green, 1990; Sears and Funk, 1991), these findings have led public opinion research on immigration to shift attention toward symbolic type threats as predominant sources of anti-immigrant sentiment and policy support. Within the identity or symbolic threat approach, opposition to immigration is based upon the perception that immigration poses threats to American culture, values or identity. The main argument we register toward the emphasis given this approach in the political science literature, as well as the often impressionistic juxtaposition of economic and symbolic threats, is that it has served to relegate non-economic cultural oriented threats to the realm of the unrealistic. Given its intellectual foundations in symbolic politics theory (Sears, Tyler, Allen, and Lau, 1980) and social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981; Brown, 1995), the symbolic threat approach encourages the conceptualization of the non-economic consequences of immigration largely in terms of competition for the maintenance of cultural identities and group status. This emphasis has led to an under-theorization of the potentially realistic yet non-economic sources of threat introduced by immigration.
As an alternative to economic resource competition, symbolic politics, or social identity based approaches to the conceptualization of the threats posed by immigration, we present a theory of acculturation threat. This theory of cultural threat argues that change within individual Americans’ proximate socio-cultural environments, and certain types of intercultural contact experiences deriving from this change, provide a realistic yet non-economic basis for the perception of threat and the formation of restrictionist immigration policy preferences. To be sure, the argument this theory advances is that as the influx of immigrants into local contexts leads to a greater prevalence of both cultural out group members and unfamiliar cultural stimuli, individual Americans residing within these local environments will be susceptible to a form of threat characterized by a reduction in their experienced level of adjustment, belonging, and social and cultural competence within their own “home” environment. These personal local experiences, we hypothesize, should translate into enhanced perception of the threats posed by immigrants and increased opposition to immigration.
We believe that this theory has face validity given how average Americans communicate about heir experiences of cultural threat in everyday life. In contrast to complaining about experiencing threats to cherished values, customs, norms, or traditions as our existing academic communication of the concept of cultural threat would lead us to believe; American’s gripes over immigration, when not addressing beliefs about economic impacts, commonly come in the form of individual Americans’ bemoaning the emergence of signs in Spanish at popular American retail stores and government agencies, the inability to effectively communicate with out group members whose English is poor or difficult to discern, the off-putting experience of encountering large numbers of Latino day laborers “loitering” in front of a local convenience store or neighborhood corner, and the presence and rapid growth of entire neighborhoods in one’s surrounding community where the signs, stores, and people are largely if not entirely Hispanic. These types of “gripes” without a doubt are rooted in what Huntington (2004) describes as the scale, concentration, persistence, and sluggish assimilation of Mexican immigrants.
In this paper, we focus our attention on foreign language exposure as a concrete dimension of intercultural contact likely to occur within proximate environments that are undergoing cultural change due to the influx of immigrants. Language-use and the ability to effectively communicate with others are central for the obtainment of social and cultural competence. The prevalence of non-English language speakers within individual Americans’ local contexts and the resulting presence of barriers to effective interpersonal communication embody our concept of acculturation threat by challenging a core aspect of Americans’ social and cultural competence within their surrounding socio-cultural environment. We present evidence from three separate studies, one survey-based and two experimental, in support of our theory of acculturation threat. Results from our survey analyses demonstrate that residing within local contexts with higher rates of non- English speakers directly enhances white residents’ perception of immigration as the most important issue facing government and the perception of immigrants as a burden rather than a benefit. Results from two separate experimental studies employing two distinct Spanish language manipulations compliment our survey analyses by demonstrating that particular forms of interpersonal and non-interpersonal exposure to foreign language increases the individual perception of the threats posed by immigrants and enhances support for anti-immigration policy.