Karthick Ramakrishnan, UC Riverside

Illegal immigration is a salient and contentious issue in the United States. Restrictionists often posit principled arguments based on legality, while their critics counter that such attitudes are driven primarily by racial antipathy. Surprisingly, no study has yet isolated the effects of varying legal status on public opinion, and the ways in which national origin cues might interact with legal status. We conduct such an analysis, based on embedded survey experiments in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find evidence for both principled politics and radicalization, with respondents applying principled distinctions selectively across racial cues.