Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2011, pp. 1--4

Social Psychology and Contemporary ImmigrationPolicy: An Introduction

Kevin Lanning∗Florida Atlantic University

This provides a brief introduction to the articles and commentary that constitutethe ASAP collection on “The Social Psychology of Contemporary ImmigrationPolicy.” The collection includes four themes: challenges for law enforcement,group relations and social justice, effects of policy on individuals and communities,and media effects.

In spring 2010, the Arizona legislature passed and Governor Jan Brewersigned into law SB 1070, at that time considered to be the most restrictive anti-immigration law in the country. In the summer of that year, a “town hall” onimmigration policy was held at the annual meeting of the Society for the Psycho-logical Study for Social Issues (SPSSI). Following that session, the ASAP editorialboard invited the articles for a special collection on the social psychology of immi-gration policy. Eleven of the best articles received in response to that call, togetherwith six brief essays that serve as commentary, constitute the present collection.

The decision to issue the call for articles for the immigration collection wasnot made lightly. ASAP’s sister publication, the Journal of Social Issues, hadrecently dedicated half of its 2010 volume to the topic of immigration, and thereare certainly other pressing social problems that warrant the attention of SPSSIjournals.1 And yet, immigration policy in general and SB 1070 in particulararguably lie at the nexus of SPSSI’s concern for social justice and the expertise of

∗Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kevin Lanning, Florida AtlanticUniversity, 5353 Parkside Dr., Jupiter, FL 33458 [e-mail: kevin.lanning@gmail.com].

1The two JSI issues on immigration were addressed to Latinos and Latino Immigrants inthe United States (Ryan & Casas, 2010) and Immigrants and Hosts: Perceptions, Interactions andTransformations (Deaux, Esses, Lalonde, & Brown, 2010). Direct links to these collections areprovided in an online virtual issue that includes the present collection which may be found atthe Wiley-ASAP homepage, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291530-2415or http://bit.ly/ASAPjournal.

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DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-2415.2011.01271.x C© 2011 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

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its membership in the social sciences. This is apparent in each of the four themesof the special collection, as well as in the commentary.

Challenges for Law Enforcement

The central role of social psychology in immigration policy is manifest, inpart, in the impact of these policies on law enforcement. Nier, Gaertner, Nier,and Dovidio recognize that regulations, which require law enforcement officersto differentially treat those who appear alien, such as SB 1070, are unlikely tofunction without the ethnic profiling of their targets. Fisher, Deason, Borgida, andOyamot suggest that this problem may be addressed, if only partially, by a trainingprogram for law enforcement officers that includes exposure to egalitarian norms.Changes in immigration law have adverse consequences not just for those whoare detained or targeted, but for law enforcement officers as well: Epstein andGoff examine some of the costs of cross-deputization, that is, giving local lawenforcement officers the responsibility of enforcing federal immigration policy.These costs include a reduction in community trust and a reduction also in thesafety of both law enforcement officers and the general public.

Group Relations and Social Justice

A dominant theme in the collection is how immigration policies reflect, illumi-nate, and determine intergroup relations. Mukherjee, Molina, and Adams maintainthat attitudes toward immigration are not superficial beliefs grounded solely in aconcern for law, but these attitudes also reflect more deeply on a relatively nar-row, exclusive, and arguably ethnocentric conception of American identity. In thecommentary, Negy takes issue with this claim, arguing that concerns about illegalimmigration may be understood as arguments about procedural justice. He main-tains that the United States restricts immigration and has procedures in place toapply for legal residency and that those who do not follow the laws do so at a costto others. This “zero-sum” viewpoint is widely shared by individuals who main-tain more restrictive views on immigration, as is noted in a separate comment byEsses, Brochu, and Dickson. These latter authors describe a model of intergroupconflict which underscores the argument made by Diaz, Saenz, and Kwan thatrecent increases in anti-immigrant sentiment have occurred at a time of increasingeconomic distress, and this is consistent with a form of scapegoating that has beenall too familiar with American history.

Stephan examines immigrant-native relations in the context of the socialpsychology of intergroup relations and provides a taxonomy of methods that canreduce tension, enhance mutual understanding, and serve mutually shared goals.Unfortunately, as Bean and Stone note in the commentary, the Arizona legislature

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has recently passed a bill (HB 2281) that effectively constrains the teaching ofethnic studies; passage of the bill will reduce the opportunity for the type ofintergroup appreciation called for by Stephan.

A very different type of intervention is proposed by Hill and Fiber. In theircomment, these authors note that deliberative polling can be used to both informand assess attitudes on social policies. Empirically, they find that participation ina deliberative poll concerning attitudes toward immigration is accompanied by asignificant increase in tolerance toward immigrants.

Effects of Immigration Policy on Individuals and Communities

Three of the articles and one of the comments focus on the impact of immigra-tion laws on individuals and communities. In an ethnographic study of deportedmigrants set in the border town of Mexicali, Sarabia notes systemic flaws in con-temporary policy, which effectively leave migrants in a marginal status, whichshe terms “perpetual illegality.” Levers and Hyatt-Burkhart invoke the notion oftrauma in their analysis of both the process of immigration and subsequent ac-culturative stress. Sladkova, Mangado, and Quinteros examine how the threat orfact of deportation can carry with it consequences for whole communities. Withtheir focus on Cambodian migrants in Lowell, Massachusetts, Sladkova and hercolleagues remind us that concerns about immigration policy extend beyond His-panics and beyond the border states of the American Southwest. These articles, aswell as Lee’s comment, illuminate the cost of immigration policy for individualhuman lives.

Media Effects

Two articles illustrate the role of the mass media in shaping attitudes bothamong immigrants and in the population at large. Fryberg and her colleaguesexamined the frames in which newspaper articles presented arguments concernedwith SB 1070, finding that national (as opposed to local) newspapers were morelikely to discuss the bill in terms of the seemingly polarizing concepts of threatand civil rights. Trujillo and Paluck consider the consequences of immigrationpolicy for civic engagement among Latinos, and they empirically examine howpro-census scenes in a telenovela can increase positive affect toward governmentamong skeptical viewers. The central role of the media in shaping attitudes islikely partly responsible for the “Latino paradox” noted by Zarate and Quezada.In their comment, they note that across cities, the proportion of Latino immigrantsis inversely correlated with homicide rates, and this is directly counter to a widelyheld stereotype that sees Latino communities as dangerous and, by extension, seesLatino immigrants as criminals.

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Coda

A collection such as this, as Zarate and Quezada remind us, is inevitablyincomplete. Nonetheless, I believe that the questions raised in the articles andcommentary are consciousness-raising in the right ways and should inspire con-tinuing consequential scholarship in the years to come.

KEVIN LANNING is a professor of psychology at the Wilkes Honors Collegeof Florida Atlantic University, and is the Editor of Analyses of Social Issues andPublic Policy.