Racial Identities, Linguistic Proficiency, and Public Attitudes Towards Immigrants: Evidence From Two Surveys in Taiwan

Are host populations more accepting of immigrants who are racially similar and/or linguistically proficient in the host vernacular? The empirical focus in the literature has been largely dominated by Western democracies where the host society is white-and therefore the immigrants are often non-white. As such, we lack a theoretical explanation for how race moderates other markers-for example, language-when it comes to immigrant attitudes. To remedy this, we shift the focus to Taiwan, where the "New Residents"-a new catch-all census category for all post-1987 immigrants regardless of race, language, and national origins-offers an empirical opportunity to test our theory. In a conjoint experiment of Taiwanese attitudes and a survey of New Residents, we find attitudes are (1) most positive for Han Chinese who can speak a Taiwanese vernacular; (2) the least positive for Han Chinese who cannot speak a Taiwanese vernacular; and (3) relatively positive when immigrants are neither racially similar nor linguistically proficient. These findings, however, are conditional on the New Residents being from a non-politicized country (i.e., not China). The results have implications for how we study immigration, Taiwanese politics, and the Chinese diaspora.