A distinction with a difference: The influence of social concerns and racial prejudice on support for amnesty

In recent years, strong public opposition to amnesty has prevented the passage of any new immigration laws that include a "pathway to citizenship" for the millions of undocumented immigrants who reside in the United States. Much scholarship on the origins of white opposition to immigration has focused on ethnocentrism. However, it has also tended to conflate racial prejudice with potentially non-racial social concerns - even though the latter could, in theory, be ameliorated through policy design in ways that racism could not. Using experiments embedded within a large national survey, we disentangle the effects of both ethnic prejudice and social concerns on public opinion. Our results indicate that significant social concerns exist independent of racial considerations, and attitudes are quite responsive to policy designed to alleviate them. Further, the extent of this responsiveness depends on partisanship. Once these considerations are addressed through policy design, we find measurably wider support for a pathway to citizenship than would be predicted were racial prejudice the underlying motivator of these social concerns.