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1 - What Do Americans Want from Immigration Policy, and Why?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2020

Morris Levy
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Matthew Wright
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Summary

What does a nation of immigrants want from its immigration policy, and why? The evidence from decades of public polling defies simple answers. Scholars and journalists reflexively label people as “pro-immigrant” or “anti-immigrant” and seek to situate them along a spectrum running between these two poles. But most Americans hold seemingly idiosyncratic mixes of “pro-” and “anti-immigrant” opinions across the range of controversies that make up contemporary immigration debates. Their opinions about specific policies routinely deviate from their more general feelings about immigrants and immigration and confound familiar explanations based on “economic” or “cultural” threat. Their views about different facets of immigration policy diverge to the point that the great majority of Americans at once endorse some policies that would greatly expand immigrant admissions and rights and others that would sharply curtail them.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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