Ramiro Martinez Florida International University
SES-1023317 Eric Stewart Florida State University
There has been increased interest in understanding the determinants of public sentiment toward Latinos in the United States. While there has been much public discourse about harsher punitive measures to prevent immigrants from crossing the border into the United States, little is known about the social context that generates support for anti-Latino sentiment. To better understand these processes, the investigators will analyze data from a recent national survey on attitudes towards immigrants and Latinos. The investigators will link the survey data to county-level crime, social, and economic data, as well as political and demographic data. The researchers will study whether punitive sentiment toward Latinos is the result of individual and macro level-influences. In particular, the plan is to examine census-based measures, such as size of the Latino population, immigration rates, unemployment rates, and other factors such as negative perceptions of Latinos are significantly to see if these are related to public support for punitive-Latino sentiment. They research will also investigate whether or not Latino population growth leads to anti-Latino hate crime victimization and/or immigrant restriction policies across counties in the United States.
Broader Impacts
Research findings will be of interest to students and researchers across multiple disciplines, as well as immigration and criminal justice policymakers in local, state, and federal government agencies. The results will be disseminated at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology and the American Sociological Association. Additionally, the study will produce a new aggregated data archive on immigration, Latino threat, and the impacts on U.S. society which will be made available for data analysis through Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
This proposal emanates from the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network (RDCJN), an NSF-supported research network for encouraging collaboration on the study of race, crime, and justice and increasing racial and ethnic diversity in academia among faculty of color. Both PIs are original members of the RDCJN and are active in the Network. In line with the collaborative and nurturing goals of the RDCJN, the proposed project will provide an important original research experience for graduate students at two research institutions by incorporating them into the research process and exposing them to members of the Network and the PIs' institutions. The collaborative activity will also broaden the participation of underrepresented groups and enhance the infrastructure for research partnerships at the PIs home institutions. The lead PI is at a Hispanic Serving Research Institution and the co-PI is at a flagship state school well regarded for the large number of African American students that graduate from its programs each year. In addition, the PIs will incorporate findings from this research study into both graduate and undergraduate courses and make the data available to others teaching related courses. This study will allow the investigators to integrate research and education by training students at two institutions and providing them with original research and teaching experiences, thereby broadening their graduate education and making them more marketable to future employers and contributing to their future research agendas.
PI: Ramiro Martinez Intellectual merit and contribution: The original intent of this collaborative project was to test the minority group threat thesis by empirically investigating how Latino population size and perceptions of Latino criminal, economic, and political threats influence anti-Latino sentiment. Attitudes are important to consider because perceptions of Latino threat are associated with social, economic, and population factors and other influences including general punitive attitudes. For example, minority group threat hypothesis papers have typically examined a single influence and most have been at the aggregate level. This portion of the study attempted to simultaneously capture cross-level characteristics that might generate perceptions of Latinos and inform policy geared towards a group that is new in many areas of the country. When completed this study should answer questions about the determinants of anti-Latino sentiment. The collaborative project also explored potential eactions to Latino threat by looking at behavioral consequences of Latino growth. We created an outcome variable capturing criminal reactions to Latinos by including a measure of reported anti-Latino hate crime. Police agencies at the municipal or place level reported the number of hate crimes against Latinos increased by 36 percent between 2003 and 2006. We summed the number of Latino hate crimes to the county level and created a measure of anti-Latino bias. This was an extensive and time consuming process since the data had to be extracted by hand from a raw file provided to us by the FBI. Currently we are creating another behavioral outcome measure tapping into legislative reactions to Latino threat by constructing an index based on immigration-related local ordinances. These include cities or counties that have attempted to pass legislation regulating immigration through local housing ordinances barring rental of apartments to unauthorized immigrants, restrictions on granting local services to immigrants, attempts to prevent immigrant children from attending school, efforts to restrict employing undocumented immigrants, and the adoption of English as the official language of the local governments. In the absence of federal immigration reform, local governments have filled the void by proposing or adopting ordinances in at least 104 cities and counties in 28 states that attempt to target, control, and restrict undocumented immigration. These ordinances encompass an array of restriction issues but we contend they all symbolize local reactions to the growth of immigrant Latinos and concern about this perceived threat. Third, we are constructing an outcome that examines places where local police are engaging in federal immigration activities and enforcing immigration laws through the investigation, apprehension, and detention of undocumented immigrants known as the 287(g) program, a clause in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. This agreement allows local police officers to perform federal immigration law enforcement functions including using federal databases to check the immigration status of individuals and to process them for deportation hearings when necessary. The initial findings indicate that Latino population size influences anti-Latino hate crime. However, Latino population growth, measures of criminal, economic, and political threats at the aggregation of county-level, homicide rate, poverty rate, region, and population density were unrelated to anti-Latino hate crime victimization. Given the overwhelming null findings, we are currently exploring alternative model specifications consistent with our NSF proposal. More specifically, we are reanalyzing the data to assess the extent to which county-level Latino hate crime influences anti-Latino sentiment. Our focus in the reanalysis is to investigate whether a legacy of Latino hate crime influences anti-Latino sentiment in counties. Broader Impact of this Research We are in the process of disseminating our key findings to the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology this fall, 2012. When the entire collaborative proposal is completed this project will also produce a new aggregated data archive on immigration, Latino threat and its impact of on U.S. society. We have disseminated our initial findings to some members of the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network (RDCJN), an NSF-supported research network for encouraging collaboration on the study of race, crime, and justice and increasing racial and ethnic diversity in academia among faculty of color. The proposed project provided an important original research experience for graduate students at two research institutions by incorporating them into the research process and exposing them to members of the Network and the PIs’ institutions. Although collecting county level data was a time consuming process, the skills developed by the research assistant helped her land an important position in a local research agency. The PIs are still incorporate findings from this research study into both graduate and undergraduate courses and making the data available to others teaching related courses. This portion of the collaborative study allow training students at two institutions, providing them with original research and teaching experiences, broadened their graduate education, made them more marketable to future employers and contributed to their future research agendas.
