Professor and WISIR Director Sophia Jordán Wallace was recently published in The Washington Post. The article, “Americans support releasing migrant children from detention and oppose family separation, new data shows” draws from original data and new findings from her book, Walls, Cages, and Family Separation, co-authored with Chris Zepeda-Millán. The article explores what motivates support for child detention and family separation and what obstacles complicate the reshaping of immigration policy for the Biden administration. The book and article use public opinion data comprised of 1,109 white respondents surveyed in August 2019 and finds that although white public opinion is polarized around party lines, including some immigration policies like the creation of a border wall, they are broadly unified in their opposition to detention of migrant children. While partisan differences are more significant regarding family separation than child detention, this policy also remains largely unpopular among the white population generally: 97 percent of Democrats disapprove either stronger or somewhat, while 50 percent of Republicans did.
Although only 17 percent of white Republicans strongly support family separation, how might the Biden administration generate even greater public support for policy reform? Here, the authors provide critical insight into what motivates these attitudes, suggesting a path forward: “Worry about how immigration from Latin America is changing American culture, which we call “cultural threat.” Among those who strongly feel immigration is a cultural threat, only 49 percent oppose separating families. Fully 90 percent of those who feel immigration poses a low cultural threat — or almost all of them — opposed separating families. These results are consistent with racialized threat narratives on immigration, which often frame Latinos as a threat in terms of negative potential impacts on job opportunities, changing language and customs, as well as other broader cultural, societal and economic harms.” Thus, the authors suggest that the Biden administration can take critical steps by refusing to frame immigration as a crisis or threat and by selecting alternative policy solutions to child detention and family separation: “releasing children and not keeping them in detention is not only what activists want, but also what the public supports.”
Read the full article here.
