While promising mass deportation and an immigration crackdown, Donald Trump gained Latino support in 2024, just as he had in 2020. Why do some Latinos support anti-immigration policies and candidates? Loren Collingwood finds that many Latinos separate themselves from recent immigrants as atypical of their group. But does that explain recent Democratic politician moves? He also finds that legislators respond to local interest groups, not only district opinion. And he has other research showing where sanctuary city policies matter and where they do not. Even with some support, he still expects a backlash to Trump policies.
Guest: Loren Collingwood, University of New Mexico
Study: Social Mobility through Immigrant Resentment
Matt Grossmann: Why some Latinos support the Trump immigration agenda, this week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. While promising mass deportation and an immigration crackdown, Donald Trump gained Latino support in 2024, just as he had in 2020. Why do some Latinos support the immigration crackdown and anti-immigration candidates like Trump? Is it an ideological sorting that is likely to continue or will it hit its limits as the crackdown begins? This week, I talked to Loren Collingwood of the University of New Mexico about several of his projects on Latino opinion and immigration policy. He finds that many Latinos separate themselves from recent immigrants and thus support anti-immigration policy. But does that explain recent democratic politician moves? He also finds that legislators respond to local interest groups, not only district opinion, and he has other research showing where sanctuary city policies matter and where they don’t. Given the wide immigration agenda of the new Trump administration, I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So tell us about the major findings and takeaways from your recent public opinion quarterly article about social mobility through immigrant resentment.
Loren Collingwood: The major argument that we make, and it sort of puts our findings up against a lot of the dominant literature and race and ethnicity, which is group identity or linked fate. And we begin with the observation that a fairly large minority of Latino voters or Hispanic voters pretty consistently are supporting Republican candidates in more recent years, anti-immigrant candidates like Donald Trump. By anti-immigrant, I mean supporting policies that would deport millions of people that would basically make life harder for undocumented population, and to people who don’t study Latino politics, that might seem at odds with a population who themselves is one of the closer related groups to immigrants in the United States. To a sort of prototypical American, you might often put Latino and immigrant together. And so, when you hear the results of our findings or when you learn that a large share of Latino voters themselves are actually supporting Donald Trump and support punitive immigration policy, it might be sort of striking.
And I think the literature has touched on this before, but not that much. And so, we seek to try to understand why this fairly sizable minority of Latino or Hispanic voters are supporting Trump. And our main argument is that actually, a fairly large subset of Latino voters themselves hold anti-immigrant policy attitudes and based on work by others, we develop an immigrant resentment scale that’s sort of motivated in part by racial resentment, but it’s designed specifically for Latino voters themselves, not whites. Typically, we might think about whites being resentful towards immigrants and perhaps being anti-Latino. So we develop it specifically among Latinos, and we find that those high on this scale are the ones who are strongly supporting Trump and anti-immigrant policies in general. And at this explanation nation holds when we account for partisanship, ideology, denial of racism. And so, it’s pretty much this… Our argument is it’s a psychological dissociation from the negative stereotypes that Latinos might have and that from the broader society.
And there’s a subset of Latinos that are saying, let’s not find together using linked fate or group identity measures, and instead, let’s dissociate ourselves from what they actually view as, our argument is, they view themselves as dissociating from atypical Latinos or atypical LatinXs, which is to say, “These new immigrants coming in, we’re not like them. This is not us. And so therefore, in order to express that and to make sure that we’re not getting bunched in with this group that has been attacked by American politicians, we’re going to dissociate and we’re going to therefore support the candidates that are actually attacking this group of people.” So that’s our main finding. And I think it’s the first article and set of findings that really makes this case and takes on linked fate in a, maybe not exactly directly, but we have linked fate in our models and it’s not doing a lot of action here. So I think it is going to spur a lot of research in this area since Latino voters are, in a sense, the most mercurial block and least understood block of growing minority voters in the United States.
Matt Grossmann: So we usually think about Latino voters as differentiating themselves from others on the basis of the national origin, their immigrant generation or their geography. How are those kinds of differentiations related to what you find? Is it folks who have been here for multiple generations who maybe aren’t in overwhelmingly immigrant destinations who want to separate themselves?
Loren Collingwood: We didn’t unpack that as much in this particular paper, but I think the normal predictions would hold such that certain subsets of Latinos would hold higher elements of this resentment, second, third generation, those who are less close to the immigrant experience, for example. But what our findings show is holding, basically controlling for these other types of explanations that we would typically see generational status and stuff like that, we still see this very strong effect for immigrant resentment basically. So we think it’s more of a psychological variable. I mean, basically it’s a psychological variable that allows a first-generation Latino, a third-generation Latino, someone who’s Cuban, someone who’s not Cuban, someone who’s Mexican-American origin, basically allows anyone to hold that. So they have their life accounts basically, and how they view the world, the psychological experiences that they have and their processing of different events allows us to put this into this resentment type variable so that we’re not saying Cubans are this way and people from the border are that way.
And a lot of the previous work on Latinos have focused on those kinds of basically, for lack of a better term, black or white or binary categories, your Cuban or you’re not Cuban, and this kind of moves away from that. So it’s an improvement on existing understandings of the Latino vote, I would say.
Matt Grossmann: On the other hand, we have had folks on, I think with some findings that some people who previously identified as Latino started identifying as white if they had some of these kinds of views. And we had, I think Mark Ramirez on to talk about the Latino resentment among white voters. So, to what extent is that the same kind of mechanism and is it different? I think for you all, people are still trying to actually hang on to a Latino identity.
Loren Collingwood: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that this is, I mean, part of the reason our argument that people are expressing these views is because of their Latino identity. They’re trying to dissociate themselves from this broadly perceived negative group of people, i.e. immigrants or recent immigrants that get slammed a lot in the media. And so, while it’s true that in surveys when you look at people who at first they don’t… So you ask them their race and you first say, basically, “What’s your race?” And they say, “White.” And then there’s a follow-up, I’m sure you know this, there’s a follow-up that says, “Are you Hispanic?” And then they say, “Yes, I’m a Hispanic.” So people who are first saying white and then saying Hispanic when they could have said they were Latino in the first place, those people tend to be more conservative on a variety of issues.
So, those people are probably going to hold more anti-immigrant attitudes, but this is not just a color or colorism type situation that we’re dealing with. We’re basically saying that anybody, regardless of their situation, their skin color or how they might be perceived, may choose to hold these kinds of views, and here’s the reason why, and then, this is the political impact of that.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ve also seen ideological sorting among Latino voters, particularly in the last couple of presidential elections. How much do you think that is related to the kind of findings that you find? Because some of the ideological… Some of the people identifying as conservative are doing so for traditional economic reasons, but some seems to have identified as conservative on this kind of culture war type issues that might be related to what you’re showing.
Loren Collingwood: So as you know, the way that we measure ideology still I think can conceptualize along some government spending type of framework. And those of us who study public opinion would probably say that it’s not really just that. And I’m sure there’s people who’ve made those arguments, I just haven’t come across that, or who have done that testing well. But yeah, when you account for ideology, this variable is still pretty strong. And so, I would say that this is… Latinos, or a subset of Latinos are basically conservative in part because of these views that they have, and so the two are definitely going together, but empirically when you separate them out, they’re still tapping into different things.
Matt Grossmann: So your findings obviously came out before the most recent election, but 2024 saw continued movement toward Donald Trump among Hispanic voters and towards Republicans in some lower level offices. So to what extent do you think you saw some of what you find playing out last year?
Loren Collingwood: What we found, I think is what exactly happened. I think there’s this subset of Latinos who both express a denial of racism. And Rudy Alamillo’s work has demonstrated that, that are drawn to candidates like Donald Trump who make racial appeals. They respond in the same way that a prototypical white person might, or a conservative white person might. And this kind of anti-immigration, anti-immigrant rhetoric makes sense that it’s getting elevated in terms of its predictive power because it’s front and center, it is primed so strongly that a prototypical Latino individual is going to have to be hearing this, facing this, and psychologically dealing with this, and not only politically, but in their day-to-day life. And so a subset of these voters are going to say, “You know what? Actually this makes sense. I don’t want to be associated with a group of people.” And so when they respond in surveys, that linkage between that attitude and support for Trump is just going to go up.
And we’ve shown this in the past, that those linkages aren’t there really for Romney and other candidates who don’t make… I think Romney’s main… Romney did have some anti-immigrant policy positions like self-deportation. And I remember he was accused of putting on too much, as you might recall, that too much orange makeup in his, I think debate on Univision or Telemundo in that he was trying to shade himself, which was a funny thing. But compared to Trump, it’s not really comparable in terms of his rhetoric on immigration policy. So, it makes sense. Once you kind of back it out and look at it through the social identity framework that we have. It makes sense why you see this movement. And I think a lot of the research that has focused on Latinos heretofore is simply, “Let’s look at economics, let’s look at geography, let’s look at country of origin, let’s look at generation.” Yes, linked fate for a while certainly was an explanation. And even in 2012, some of my research with Matt Barreto showed that when Obama switched and started actually campaigning on DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and pushing the Dream Act and things like this, that there was this bump in enthusiasm of support for him. And in part because Democrats were never really able to actualize that and probably a subset of Latinos who were motivated by kind of pro-immigrant stances moved away from the Democrats or just moved out and just stopped voting.
And so what you might see now and I haven’t had a chance to do this analysis and maybe others have, we might be seeing really a turnout situation where more progressive, inclined pro-immigration Latinos are perhaps just exhausted from all of this or younger Latinos are not voting to the same degree that they would have in earlier eras and that the more hardcore conservative Latinos have voted more. So it shifts the overall Latino electorate to the right, even though there wasn’t actually that much vote switching going on between different cycles. I’ve done some research on vote switching, so this is something I think that researchers are going to have to look into.
Matt Grossmann: So I do understand the turnout differences, but it still seems like if the explanation for Trump’s increasing support in 2024 is that he is drawing from Latinos who have this immigration resentment, it seems like it should have happened earlier. Did they not know that Trump was anti-immigrant in 2016 or 2020? Why are we having this kind of overtime continued shift?
Loren Collingwood: That’s hard to tell. I think in my work, when we were doing some of this, we were seeing these findings basically there, at least in kind of the 2020, ’21 time period, but it was prior to that election. So it’s likely the case that this resentment measure was there and was explaining this voting behavior. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s necessarily gone up from 2020 or 2016 or 2020 to 2024. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s gone up in terms of the relationship between immigrant resentment and support for Trump among Latinos. It’s just that prior to that no one had done that work. And so we can’t really speak to it.
Matt Grossmann: So as you have mentioned, sometimes people pose economic explanations for shifts and you have found at least one election where there’s economic explanation and that people talk about the energy industry in Texas as a potential explanation or factors related to inflation or Covid in 2020. So how do these economic circumstances interact with your explanations? They do occur for some people, just not most, or do they interact and kind of related to this kind of immigration resentment?
Loren Collingwood: I mean, I can’t say for sure the precise mechanism how… Whether they’re related or not. I think at national level… So most people who do survey research it seems or have some sort of national sample, they’re either running cross sections or some sort of experimental evidence and might be have an economic indicator showing sociotropic economic attitudes, i.e., the economy is good, the economy is bad, and then maybe a personalized measure. I think there’s some evidence for that. But looking at the findings that I’ve been kind of dealing with, it doesn’t seem that the economic variable is as strongly related to basically support for Trump as an immigration variable is. But the research that I have in political behavior basically looks at a localized context of energy, basically economic dependence and seeks to explain a phenomenon where a subset of Latinos are supporting basically anti-immigrant candidates. And we isolate that by looking at a Democratic primary.
So we also take partisanship off the table and we have basically a progressive Latina candidate from San Antonio running against Henry Cuellar, who is a pretty conservative Latino, also Latino Democrat who is a strong supporter of ICE and the immigration control economy. And there what we found is basically people who work in oil and gas in that sector… This is around Laredo in south of San Antonio. And who work in immigration control, i.e., they work in ICE detention centers and border patrol. So the people who work in those facilities and rely on those for jobs are strongly supportive of Henry Cuellar. And then the converse is the case. And so it does seem that when a subset of Latinos… And this could be the case for voters everywhere. I mean, I showed this in a marijuana legalization ballot initiative in Northern California where actually I grew up. That’s why I knew to look there.
But basically people who are in economic depressed areas and a certain type of job is the only type of job they can get and even if that job conflicts with that person… Those jobs put people potentially at some sort of a moral quandary. If you’re a Latino and you’re basically putting other people who potentially look like you or have similar potential background like you in prison for crossing the border, that could be thought of as a moral quandary. And it does seem that a disproportionate share of these voters are saying, “Hey, you know what? I have to stick with this for economic reasons.” And David Cortez’s PRQ article from a while back more or less makes that case as well. So I can’t speak so much to the broader economy here, but it does seem there is a narrative that one reason why Latino voters are basically moving towards Trump, or at least in this go around, is they’re in a more economically fragile situation than your prototypical mainstream white person is. And so therefore that partially explains their vote shifting towards Trump.
And I can’t speak to that overall, but I can say that certainly seems to be the case in south Texas. And then when you look at those counties in south Texas, besides Laredo or Webb County, you look at Starr County, Cameron County, a lot of these southern counties along the border, you saw the biggest vote switching anywhere from 2016 to 2020 and it kept going. And these are like 80, 90, 95% Hispanic places. So you could at least make the extension that that vote switch is largely attributable to economic concerns. And it is hard to rule out whether it’s economics or immigration but the thing is a lot of these people are working in immigration control.
Matt Grossmann: So we have been interpreting the immigrant resentment scale on the high end of resentment and saying, “That’s what moved people towards anti-immigration attitudes and anti-immigration candidates.” But another interpretation might be that if we took this population and we didn’t know they were Latino and we just took their issue voting and their ideology, we’d expect a roughly even distribution. And so what you’re finding is a strong relationship, but actually what you’ve explained is the voters that are extremely low on immigrant resentment, in other words, they care a whole lot about immigrants are still voting Democratic and still supporting immigration policy even though that’s kind of out of step with their overall views. What do you think of that kind of reverse position?
Loren Collingwood: That’s always the issue, the all scale situation that we run into. We tend to always focus more on the high end of things. And I heard your podcast with Jennifer Chuddy and she made that case well and say, “Hey, let’s go focus on this other side of the scale. It’s not just a flip.” I guess my response would be some people would think of linked fate as potentially another side of that scale, even though it’s only usually one question. It’s something like, “How well Latinos do in America, how important is that to your own success?” And we know that among black voters, that is a very, very strong predictor of black political behavior. And my colleague here at UNM, Gabe Sanchez extended that to Latinos. It’s usually not quite as powerful, but what I do know is that variable is quite strong in work I have done in the 2012 to 2016 time period of when I was doing a couple papers on Latino voting behavior back then.
And I’m not seeing it as much in action now. So again, I can’t fully say that it’s not just the flip side of this, but what I would say is that in the past when Trump would be making sort of anti-immigrant campaign a central part of his message, that linked fate variable was strongly predictive in voting against him. And since the cue here is basically, “Hey, immigrants are bad,” it makes sense to at least theoretically think about this in terms of people getting stimulated by that. So that’s kind of how I am thinking about it.
Matt Grossmann: So we say that this subset of Latino voters favors these anti-immigration policies, but we also know that sometimes when things are actually put into effect, they can produce a move in the other direction. In the first Trump administration, the scandals surrounding kids in cages at the border seemed to really drive opinion in the other direction. And people are asking whether mass deportation, once it starts directly affecting communities, would move things in another direction. So if we take your findings at face value, I think we would say, “No. People will like that,” but I just wonder if that’s where they are now, but once they see it, it will be different.
Loren Collingwood: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the hardcore of the hardcore… And I think we evaluated this immigrant resentment scale in a couple of different basically pilot studies or what have you, and it has a nice normal distribution. It’s not one of those scales where everyone’s at one end or the other. It’s really nice and even. It’s the kind of scale that you’d love to show off in a intro to stats grad class or what have you. And so I am pretty confident that those at the high end of the scale are basically going to be the same as whites at the high end of the scale in terms of moving and basically being like, “Yes, I continue to support this. I continue to support this.” Especially if the message they’re getting from the president is like, “Hey, we have to do this.”
I mean, keep in mind they’ve already started moving strongly on mass deportation. Whether the numbers are as high as they say they’re going to be, I don’t really know yet. And we haven’t really felt the economic fall out yet. And part of the issue is attributing any economic fallout that comes. It could be related to trade and steel and other things and other policies. It’s going to be hard to really isolate that out to some degree. And I think for those of us doing research in this area, in order for us to isolate that, we’re going to have to take a more localized approach, like what I did in my work down in South Texas and those types of analyses, I think is one way to go about answering that.
But what I would say is there’s probably a subset of Latino voters who are expressing some immigrant resentment, but it probably is the case that they’re doing that because of the large immigration that was occurring at the southern border during, what was it, 2023 and the turn into 2024, that December, I think it was really, really high. A lot of these people who were coming in were not necessarily actually from Latin America, they were from other areas, I think, and just a variety of different folks. I think there’s going to be some people who are saying, “Oh, gee, that’s going to bring the heat on me and my family now.” And so therefore I need to express this kind of anti-immigrant attitude when I’m talking about anti-immigration. I’m not talking about people from my home country, I’m talking about these other types of immigrants. Or if you’re talking to someone whose Mexican American, they might be thinking of a Central American or something like that. And so those people though, when the heat ends up coming down on their community, kind of what we’ve been hearing about the Venezuelans in South Florida, I think those people might switch. And so then overall what you might end up seeing is a distribution that’s going to look more similar to 70% for Democrats potentially. What we were seeing in the Obama years, that 40 to 70% range, there’s a subset of Latinos who are conservative leaning on general economics and other immigration policies, but that when things do get hot, they’re going to potentially move the other way.
And so that’s why I call this a more mercurial group relative to other groups like say Black voters for example, that are still pretty strongly Democrat, even though a lot of the discussion in the media was like they’re switching too. And I think that was potentially obviously a little bit maybe, but the overall claim is probably not playing out the way, at least some of the racially polarized voting analysis I’ve done post election. I’ve seen very high numbers of Black voters still backing democratic candidates. So anyway, that’s a bit of an aside, but there is certainly some movement for people to switch back and then people who know people are in mixed status households or have strong connections might have on a policy matter, not like what was happening. And so maybe would’ve supported Trump. And then when it starts happening and they start seeing it, they might switch back the other way. So I certainly think they’re more likely to switch their opinion than say your prototypical white voter will be, who is probably more just stuck in on their opinion now.
Matt Grossmann: And how much does the salience of immigration matter? We know that it has been salient in recent elections, but there’s been debates about how much the ads should be different focusing on Hispanic voters, but also we’ve seen just seen a rise in immigration as an issue to target white voters as well. Potentially if flows are reduced or if people become concerned with other things, maybe will these attitudes remain important among as important among Hispanic voters?
Loren Collingwood: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think with Trump’s rhetoric and the salience of this issue going up, going up, and we see when you’re looking at the exit polls, you’re seeing at least among Republicans, immigration was one or two as overall depending on the state. It was up there too. And what made it easier for Trump relative to the Democrats is that he was sort of in part blending the two, economy and immigration together. And so it’s a nice story. So I do think that when this issue was super hot, then Latinos are going to have to, a lot of them will relative to other groups, in part because we’re talking Southern border, there’s a lot of stereotypes about this. It’s not like it’s the only thing that they can concern about, but it kind of gets forced onto the population and they potentially have to psychologically reckon with it more.
And so then the connection between vote choice and some of these attitudes are going to be stronger, but when this issue dies back down again, we might see the exact same person. That variable is not connected so much to their vote choice, but it’s really more related to economic concerns or just it blends back into partisanship because they remembered at some point they liked Republicans because they were stronger on these issues, and then it kind of fades away. And then as someone who kind of studies it kind of blends back into the mix into partisanship or general, a blend of ideological constraints, then you might start to see just it being more about partisanship, which is typically the main explanation for vote choice and attitudes. But we keep seeing these other variables moving in and moving out in a way that I think is a little bit less common for some other groups.
Matt Grossmann: So you’ve also done research explaining elite behavior on immigration, and you found some connections between constituent opinion and legislative decisions, but you’ve also found that interest groups and money can play roles in those decisions. So tell us a little bit about the state of your research on that, but then maybe you can connect it a little bit to the recent moves, which is that a lot of Democrats voted in favor of a restrictive immigration bill without any path to citizenship last summer, which they had not been doing in the past. And then several Democrats just voted for this Laken Riley Act, which was a rather conservative or right proposal on immigration enforcement. So do any of those factors this change in constituent opinion or money and interest groups help to explain that trend?
Loren Collingwood: Well, it’s certainly the case. I mean, a lot of this work I do with my colleague, Jason Marine and others too. But we effectively look at the influence of private prison interests, which is corporate interests on democratic representation. And what we tend to find is among Republicans, they’re basically voting anti, or they’re supporting punitive immigration, or let’s just say strong border policy. They want a more militarized border, a stronger border, more money going to ICE detention, more money going to customs border patrol, more money building walls. And Democrats typically are opposed to a lot of those things. The legislators themselves are, they tend to take a more humanitarian approach, a more humane approach they would say, and putting someone in a detention center is not necessarily the best way to deal with this for a variety of reasons.
And so what we find is that there’s a subset of, regardless of whether a district is a liberal on immigration policy, i.e., they want say a comprehensive immigration reform or not, or whether regardless of the demographic composition of the district, you might think in general in a more Latino district, the representative is going to be more pro-immigration, for lack of a more detailed word, but more pro-immigration versus anti-immigration voting behavior by the legislature, which is typically true.
But we also find this effectively an interaction effect between whether a democratic legislator has a private immigrant detention center in their district and how they vote on matters related to immigration policy, which is to say, and this is from an earlier paper, not the more recent ones, but we basically find that democratic legislators with private immigrant detention centers in their districts basically disproportionately co-sponsor punitive immigration policy, which is to say that if those policies are enacted, the companies stand to profit basically. That’s kind the nature of the idea. And then what we found recently was that these legislators are more likely to, if they get paid more in PAC contributions, they were less likely to support the Dignity Not Detention Act, which was a democratic bill basically designed to end privatized immigrant detention. And so not every Democrat supported that and no Republican supported or co-sponsored it, but not every Democrat did.
And so we effectively create a dummy variable between who did and who didn’t co-sponsor it, and that we see that DW nominate scores and constituent opinion on immigration, etc, etc. There’s still this remaining effect for whether these legislators had received political action committee donations from either the GEO group or from Corrections Corporation of America, the two major private immigrant detention centers. And they were people who had received money were basically less likely to support this measure with respect to the Laken Riley Act. I did a quick back of the envelope analysis on that. I figured there might be some, even before we talked, I figured there might be some interest in that, and there seems to be a little bit of purchase on there. I found a small relationship, basically Democrats who were supporting that bill, which I think was a bill that prison companies would generally support, where a little bit more likely to, or who had facilities in their district rather, we’re a little bit more likely to support the bill.
But I think, I don’t know if that would’ve held up in a statistical kind of bigger analysis, but there seemed to be a bit of a explanation there. And we haven’t yet looked at the PAC contributions on that one because our other paper on this typically says that there’s a vote and then there’s a payoff as opposed to the other way around. I know this is an innocent and dodging any concern that a lot of Congress scholars have. So I think this is part of the explanation why a minority, a small subset of democratic legislators basically support punitive immigration policy writ large, is they’re effectively being cross pressured by corporate interests and vis-a-vis against basically liberal immigration policy issues or constituency preferences. And that’s basically a book that I’m working on with Jason right now. So we’re close to being done with it. We have to put some more attention to the existing literature, etc, etc. As you know, is always important to build this out in terms of representation. But that’s more or less what we’re finding right now.
Matt Grossmann: I mean, it seems like that would be a, I don’t know if it’s a constant factor, but an ongoing factor. Whereas these latest two bills where last summer they just went with an all enforcement bill with pretty broad democratic support. And then a few Democrats on this Laken Riley are evidence that Democrats are moving to the right on immigration maybe more generally in the last year. And at least if you listen to them, they seem to be referencing the election a lot or constituency opinion a lot. So I just wonder if part of it is that they are learning that immigration enforcement is popular even among some Hispanic voters.
Loren Collingwood: And obviously we know that it’s popular among some Hispanic voters. And so it used to be the case. I feel like in this area you could just plug in a percent Latino variable and call it a day and knowing that on average it’s going to shake out. And to some degree that’s still true empirically, but I think it needs to be thought of more. And so those kind of baseline census measures may not be as useful or we need to be more careful with that. Whether these different legislators who are basically backing more punitive immigration policy, is it due to constituent opinion? I don’t know.
I mean, we don’t have what we did to measure constituent opinion it was… I think we stacked a couple CES data sets together, cooperative election surveys, or it used to be CCS and then they changed it as we stacked those together, we’re able to get a pretty good measure, like an average score or something by congressional district and use that. So I don’t know whether it’s changed based on that data of course, since I did that analysis. But one would think that maybe these legislators are doing polling and they’re polling on this and they’re seeing that. And I think that that is probably true to some degree. And you see Ruben Gallego backing Laken Riley, who he himself is Hispanic.
Loren Collingwood: Backing Laken Riley, who he himself is Hispanic. And yeah, it does seem like Democrats have moved to the middle on this. And if I had to speculate, I think it is partly because of so much immigration came in southern border and it basically handed the election to the Republicans. I mean, I think that’s a point that a lot of people would probably agree on.
Matt Grossmann: So in the post-election aftermath, there’s been a broader internal Democratic feuding. One of the things that’s come up is about Democratic responsiveness to the groups, quote-unquote. And part of that discussion has been about this idea that representation of identity groups both among interest groups and among staff within Democratic organizations and campaigns, tends to get the part of the Hispanic community that is most in favor of immigration. And so politicians or the party may have gotten the wrong idea about the concerns of this constituency. Particularly when you’re thinking back to the 2019 primary where everyone raises their hand not to make border crossing not a criminal offense. That was kind of because there was this idea that the groups who represented Hispanics were telling us this is what Hispanics wanted. So I guess what would you think about that debate in the context of your findings?
Loren Collingwood: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s generally the case. I think the advocacy groups on the left that are informing Democratic candidates and potentially some of the consultants are going to naturally be pro-immigrant. And so it’s hard to be pro-immigrant just for, well, those who have been here for 20 years or just those who are children. I mean, you can make that policy stance, but from a sort of normative, even academic standpoint, you can’t really say, well, I’m only pro-immigrant over here, but not these recent Brazilians or not these recent Central Americans or something like that. And so you are basically run into a situation where you have advocacy groups’ normative commitments coming up against the political reality that if you take that stance, there might be political blow back and then you will potentially lose in an election as a result.
And so it is probably the case that some of that is there. And I’m going to leave that up to either the consultants or the Democratic Party, whoever’s mobilizing these voters, what they should do. What I would say is, okay, so say you come across a Latino respondent or someone in your data, you flag them as being X on this measure. Say you have a pro-immigration scale that you’re using microdata to target them on, and you have it in deciles or something, 0 to 10, which is kind of common. They get all this data, they look at your magazine subscriptions or your clicks or whatever, and they do machine learning and figure out where you are, and they’re trying to figure out how to mobilize you.
Maybe what they’re doing is they’re saying, okay, let’s take everyone over a cut point of .8 and then let’s just mobilize them. And instead of trying to figure out those people in the middle from a .4 to .6 that might have these high immigrant resentments, but then they could also line up with Democrats on these other side and other concerns, and then they could get that kind of targeting. I don’t know for sure, I don’t know who’s doing this work. Well, I think I might know, but I can’t say for sure.
And this is a common unpacking that gets done after every loss that, okay, where are we missing? But what I would say is that the Latino electorate is, a lot of my earlier work basically looks at this demographic change and says, this group is fundamental to winning elections moving forward, especially for the Democrats. But not only for the Democrats, but for the Republicans. Democrats need to figure out how to run the table with this group, and Republicans need to figure out basically to do exactly what they did in the last election, is get the 40% or so. And if Republicans can get the 40% with Latinos, they’re probably going to keep winning. And if Democrats can get 65, 70% plus, they’re going to win just because of where Latinos are located.
And so figuring out the immigration issue, it’s hard to run from this issue when you’re a Democrat because all my studies on this show that on immigration, like sanctuary cities don’t have more crime or not, or at least the policy effect of going and becoming a sanctuary city doesn’t make it more likely that everyone’s going to get killed and all these things are going to happen, but there’s always going to be an anecdote of it there. And so the Republican elected officials basically come on and say, look at this Laken Riley situation, and it’s very hard to respond to that from some sort of pro-immigration stance. You have to say, well, that’s an anecdote and blah, blah, blah. Your average voter or American doesn’t understand anecdotes or they don’t care. They just see that that person died, and that’s wrong. And I haven’t seen basically people on the left or Democrats come up with an explanation for that yet.
So I think that needs to get sorted out. And so I’ll leave that up to them, but there certainly needs to be more work in this area among that group of people who are figuring this out.
Matt Grossmann: You mentioned that you’ve also done work on sanctuary cities, which are also likely to be in the news a lot in the coming months. The Trump administration, I think, is suing Illinois over some of its sanctuary policies. They seem to have defunded a program in the middle of payments in New York to house immigrants partially in response to that. And more broadly, they want to crack down on these kinds of local policies. So given your findings, how should we expect this to play out?
Loren Collingwood: Yeah, I’ve been getting a lot of reporters calling me up and emailing me recently. And so I think the initial play out is Democratic elites are… Well right now what you have is this actual personal threat that if you oppose us, we’re going to basically prosecute you and put you in jail, elected officials themselves. Which is the key difference. I don’t recall hearing that from 2017. And so there will probably be this legal battle that’s going on right now, and then some rulings will come down and basically potentially sort that out or it’ll just get stuck and that’s where we’re at and there won’t be this growth or retraction of sanctuary policies at the local level.
But assuming that that plays out to some degree, and I think, is it Brandon Johnson, who’s the mayor of Chicago, is supposed to be going to DC or maybe already has, to testify in sanctuary cities and crime, and a few other people are. I’m pretty sure they rely on my research in order to provide the evidence for their case at least. So once that plays out legally, and maybe let’s just say that, okay, someone who is a mayor or elected official at a city in the United States wants to become a sanctuary city, they know that if they do that they’re not going to go to jail. Then I would expect a growth of cities becoming sanctuary cities.
What we saw in 2017 was a massive explosion of sanctuary cities around the United States from something like 80 to 350 or something like that. Then this is dealing differently with counties. I don’t look at the counties as much, just for whatever reason that we’ve gone more that the city route. And so I would expect a possible increase in that. We’ve seen a general overtime increase in the rise of sanctuary cities, and we also would expect to see a strengthening of sanctuary policy in these different cities, which is to say that there’s about six or seven things that cities can do in their textual documents, their resolutions, their ordinances that essentially say how strong their policy is and basically how hard it is for ICE to get at the immigrants they’re trying to get at. And they can make that harder or they can make that weaker. They can be more cooperative. They can be less cooperative.
And so if at least my counting to date would be that overall policy score of different cities becoming and how much so has tended to increase in response to political threat. And what they tend to do is they tend to do copycat legislation or copycat ordinances. And so cities that are basically have super high scores on this are going and looking at all these other cities and trying to get different components of different policies in searching around, it’s actually what I’m working on right now. And so there seems to be a very strong relationship between cities that have high scores and how much… Basically the centrality of their node in this larger sanctuary city network is basically what I’m finding.
But this is a key issue. If the presidential administration, if the Trump administration is to be able to deport millions and millions of people, they need to buckle sanctuary cities, they need to, and it will just make their life a lot easier in terms of deporting people. And so I think that this is a fundamental issue in immigration right now.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. And I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next all linked on our website. Values and Racism in American Immigration Views, The Two Sides of Immigration Backlash, Why Latinos Move Toward Trump, But Why Most are Still Democrats, Is White Identity Causing a Blcklash Against Immigration? And, Are Black Voters Moving to Trump?
Thanks to Loren Collingwood for joining me. Please check out Social Mobility Through Immigrant Resentment, and then listen in next time.