No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Immigration Clashes, Party Polarization, and Republican Radicalization: Tracking Shifts in State and National Party Platforms since 1980
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2023
Abstract
Studies of U.S. politics increasingly aim to make sense of two key trends: party polarization and Republican Party radicalization. Surprisingly, however, party divergences on immigration have been largely overlooked. Drawing on state and national political party platforms since 1980, we document the rise of attention to immigration, the polarization of substantive party positions, and the sharp GOP turn toward restrictive measures. After pinpointing the timing and relative trajectories of national and state-level agenda shifts, we explore potential drivers and establish two sets of flashpoint events worth further study: highly visible and mostly deadlocked congressional battles over immigration grand bargains, and bottom-up reverberations from the widespread 2006 immigrant rights protests and post-2008 Tea Party organizing. We find that grassroots Tea Party efforts were intervening accelerators rather than original causes of the Republican embrace of tough immigration restrictions. The article concludes by stressing the chronological layering of successive party polarizations—from 1960s divergences around civil rights, through clashes about abortion and LGBTQ rights from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and followed by immigration polarization in the 2000s. This process of layering polarizations on top of one another may have supercharged recent GOP turns toward ethnonationalism and tolerance for threats of violence.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 “1980 Republican Presidential Candidates Debate,” C-SPAN, April 23, 1980, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.c-span.org/video/?407380-1/1980-republican-presidential-candidates-debate.
2 Analysts often speak of “cultural” versus “economic” issues, but we prefer to speak about “social-regulatory” issues, because policies about civil rights, family structures and reproductive rights, and immigration also have profound economic dimensions—above all because they help determine who can be full participants in the labor market and in the ownership and management of economic as well as civic organizations.
3 Carmines, Edward G. and Stimson, James A., Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics, repr. ed. (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mickey, Robert, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Schickler, Eric, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
4 Hacker, Jacob S. and Pierson, Paul, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (New York: Liveright, 2020)Google Scholar; Pierson, Paul and Schickler, Eric, “Polarization and the Durability of Madisonian Checks and Balances: A Developmental Analysis,” in Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization?, ed. Roberts, Kenneth M., Lieberman, Robert C., and Mettler, Suzanne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 35–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skocpol, Theda and Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander, “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3 (2016): CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Gerald Gamm, Justin H. Phillips, Matthew Carr, and Michael Auslen, “The Culture War and Partisan Polarization: State Political Parties, 1960–2018” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Montreal, Québec, 2022); Spruill, Marjorie J., Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017)Google Scholar.
6 See, for example, Gamm et al., “The Culture War and Partisan Polarization”; Kenneth Janda, The Republican Evolution: From Governing Party to Antigovernment Party, 1860–2020 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022)Google Scholar; Spruill, Divided We Stand; Matthew Lacombe, Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.
7 Hajnal, Zoltan L., Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Gail Russell Chaddock, “Kennedy and Immigration: He Changed the Face of America,” Christian Science Monitor, August 28, 2009, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2009/0828/kennedy-and-immigration-he-changed-the-face-of-america.
9 Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reimers, David M., Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tichenor, Daniel J., Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See Massey, Douglas S., Durand, Jorge, and Malone, Nolan J., Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003)Google Scholar; Douglas S. Massey, “How a 1965 Immigration Reform Created Illegal Immigration,” Washington Post, September 25, 2015, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/25/how-a-1965-immigration-reform-created-illegal-immigration/; Ezra Klein, “Everything You Know about Immigration Is Wrong,” Washington Post, August 10, 2013, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/10/everything-you-know-about-immigration-is-wrong/.
11 Hopkins, Daniel J., “Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 1 (2010): 40–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Douglas, S. Massey, ed., New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008)Google Scholar.
13 Richard Cowan, “Iowa Firebrand Is Face of Republican Fight on U.S. Immigration Order,” Reuters, December 3, 2014, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-shutdown-king/iowa-firebrand-is-face-of-republican-fight-on-u-s-immigration-order-idUSKCN0JH0BE20141203; Trip Gabriel, “Before Trump, Steve King Set the Agenda for the Wall and Anti-Immigrant Politics,” New York Times, January 10, 2019, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/us/politics/steve-king-trump-immigration-wall.html; Dave Price, “Why Steve King Keeps Winning,” Politico, March 16, 2017, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/why-steve-king-keeps-winning-214913.
14 Thom, Elizabeth and Skocpol, Theda, “Trump’s Trump: Lou Barletta and the Limits of Anti-Immigrant Politics in Pennsylvania,” in Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, ed. Skocpol, Theda and Tervo, Caroline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Google Scholar.
15 Gerring, John, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996, illustrated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Janda, The Republican Evolution.
16 Feinstein, Brian D. and Schickler, Eric, “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered,” Studies in American Political Development 22, no. 1 (2008): 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schickler, Racial Realignment.
17 Gamm et al., “The Culture War and Partisan Polarization.”
18 Hopkins, Daniel J., Schickler, Eric, and Azizi, David L., “From Many Divides, One? The Polarization and Nationalization of American State Party Platforms, 1918–2017,” Studies in American Political Development 36, no. 1 (2022): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hopkins, Schickler, and Azizi aggregate and extend on collections of platforms from Joel Paddock, State and National Parties and American Democracy (New York: Peter Lang, 2005)Google Scholar; Feinstein and Schickler, “Platforms and Partners”; Daniel, J. Coffey, “Federal Parties and Polarization,” in The State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, ed. Green, John C., Coffey, Daniel J., and David, B. Cohen, 7th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)Google Scholar; Matthew A. Carr, Gerald Gamm, and Justin H. Phillips, “Origins of the Culture War: Social Issues in State Party Platforms, 1960–2014” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, 2016); Lendway, Paul and Henderson, John, “The Rise of Tea Partism in State Party Platforms” (working paper, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2020)Google Scholar.
19 The only state without any platform availability is Maryland. Additional states without Republican platform availability are Delaware, Florida, and Tennessee. Additional states without Democratic platform availability are Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, and Pennsylvania.
20 In alternative specifications, we include only paired platforms to control for variations across space and time apart from party stances as such, following the lead of Feinstein and Schickler, “Platforms and Partners.” Our results are not sensitive to the choice of including only paired platforms or all platforms, so specifications in the main text report findings from all paired and unpaired platforms using the logic that it is better to code as many platforms as possible. Appendix B shows findings including only paired platforms.
21 Between 1980 and 2000, we do have some long-term coverage, including from the border states of California and Texas.
22 We calculate this percentage by summing the number of words in platform sections relating to immigration and then dividing it by the number of words from all platforms—including those that do not mention immigration—from a given year and party. To identify references to immigration, we first manually read each platform and then checked this manual method by searching each platform for the following common immigration-related terms: “immigration,” “immigrant,” “alien,” “refugee,” and “border.”
23 For example, we would not include references to national security as references to immigration, unless such references make explicit mention of immigrants or immigration. This distinction is especially important in the years immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when many state and national platforms devoted increased attention to national security, but these references were often distinct from mentions of immigration.
24 An alternative way to measure attention, as usefully highlighted by an anonymous reviewer, is as the percentage of platforms that reference immigration in each year. This measure, plotted in Appendix C, addresses the potential concern that trends in attention are driven by a small number of platforms devoting substantial space to immigration. Both our percentage-of-words-based measure and this alternative measure display similar trends in the timing of increased attention to immigration.
25 Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “2016 Democratic Party Platform Online,” American Presidency Project, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2016-democratic-party-platform.
26 Schickler, Racial Realignment.
27 Gamm et al., “The Culture War and Partisan Polarization.”
28 See, for example, Hopkins, Daniel J., The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 “Immigration,” Gallup, last modified July 2022, accessed July 24, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx; Daniel De Visé, “How the Parties Have Realigned on Immigration,” The Hill, October 27, 2022, accessed July 24, 2023, https://thehill.com/latino/3705688-the-gop-has-changed-on-immigration-it-may-never-change-back/.
30 J. Baxter Oliphant and Andy Cerda, “Republicans and Democrats Have Different Top Priorities for U.S. Immigration Policy,” Pew Research Center, September 8, 2022, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/09/08/republicans-and-democrats-have-different-top-priorities-for-u-s-immigration-policy/.
31 Skocpol, Theda and Williamson, Vanessa, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Sebastian Parker, Christopher and Barreto, Matt A., Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
32 Bawn, Kathleen, Cohen, Marty, Karol, David, Masket, Seth, Noel, Hans, and Zaller, John R., “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 3 (2012): CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Marty, Karol, David, Noel, Hans, and Zaller, John, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karol, David, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 See especially Jeong, Gyung-Ho, Miller, Gary J., Schofield, Camilla, and Sened, Itai, “Cracks in the Opposition: Immigration as a Wedge Issue for the Reagan Coalition,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (2011): CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Gary and Schofield, Norman, “The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 3 (2008): CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Schlozman, Daniel, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).Google Scholar
35 Peng, Zeyu, “Labor Reform and Nativist Revolt: The Causes and Implications of Party Position Change on Immigration” (PhD diss., Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022)Google Scholar.
36 Jeong et al., “Cracks in the Opposition”; Miller and Schofield, “The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.”
37 Jeong et al., “Cracks in the Opposition.”
38 Kerwin, Donald, “From IIRIRA to Trump: Connecting the Dots on the Current US Immigration Policy Crisis,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 6, no. 3 (2018): 192–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Dara Lind, “The Disastrous, Forgotten 1996 Law that Created Today’s Immigration Problem,” Vox, April 28, 2016, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11515132/iirira-clinton-immigration.
39 Randal C. Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration,” New York Times, April 23, 2010, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html.
40 A. Elena Lacayo, “One Year Later: A Look at SB 1070 and Copycat Legislation,” National Council of La Raza, April 18, 2011, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.unidosus.org/publications/666-one-year-later-a-look-at-sb-1070-and-copycat-legislation/.
41 Andrew Cohen, “Razing Arizona: Supreme Court Sides with Feds on Immigration,” The Atlantic, June 25, 2012, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/razing-arizona-supreme-court-sides-with-feds-on-immigration/258932/; Richard A. Oppel, “Arizona, Bowing to Business, Softens Stand on Immigration,” New York Times, March 19, 2011, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/us/19immigration.html.
42 “H.R. 4437—109th Congress (2005–2006): Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,” Congress.gov, January 27, 2006, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/4437/all-actions.
43 Xóchitl Bada, Jonathan Fox, and Jane Guskin, “Immigrant Rights Protests—Spring 2006,” Mapping American Social Movements Project, University of Washington, accessed April 17, 2023, https://depts.washington.edu/moves/2006_immigrant_rights.shtml.
44 Perry Bacon Jr., “Are the Immigration Protests Creating a Backlash?,” Time, March 29, 2006, accessed July 24, 2023, https://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1178317,00.html; Darryl Fears, “After Protests, Backlash Grows Opponents of Illegal Immigration are Increasingly Vocal,” Washington Post, May 3, 2006, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/05/03/after-protests-backlash-grows-span-classbankheadopponents-of-illegal-immigration-are-increasingly-vocalspan/4be56219-9720-43fc-b255-2d37f8f1f17d/.
45 Wallace, Sophia J., Zepeda‐Millán, Chris, and Jones‐Correa, Michael, “Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 2 (2014): CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zepeda-Millán, Chris, Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Regina, Branton, Valerie Martinez‐Ebers, Tony E. Carey, Jr., and Matsubayashi, Tetsuya, “Social Protest and Policy Attitudes: The Case of the 2006 Immigrant Rallies,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 2 (2015): 390–402.Google Scholar
47 Bacon, “Are the Immigrant Protests Creating a Backlash?”
48 Monica McDermott, “Anti-Immigrant Backlash in the Wake of Immigrant Rights Marches and the Recession” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Las Vegas, NV, 2011).
49 See, for example, Kirin Kalia, “Immigration Ultimately Not an Issue in the 2008 Election,” Migration Policy Institute, December 4, 2008, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/immigration-ultimately-not-issue-2008-election.
50 Skocpol, Theda, Tervo, Caroline, and Walters, Kirsten, “Citizen Organizing and Partisan Polarization from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance,” in Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization?, ed. Roberts, Kenneth M., Lieberman, Robert C., and Mettler, Suzanne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 369–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
51 Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
52 Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In; Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox, “Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Elections,” Public Religion Research Institute (blog), October 5, 2010, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.prri.org/research/religion-tea-party-2010/.
53 Marcelo Ballvé, “Tea Party Dabbles in Immigration Politics,” Facing South, February 5, 2010, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.facingsouth.org/2010/02/tea-party-dabbles-in-immigration-politics.html; Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
54 Skocpol, Tervo, and Walters, “Citizen Organizing and Partisan Polarization.”
55 An exception is a uniquely nuanced study by Gervais and Morris that classified GOP House members into subsets, including some who had no visible Tea Party ties and others who were either actively supported by national Tea Party organizations and/or took active, public steps to court the movement. Analyzing congressional votes from 2011 through 2014, these authors find that even though both Tea Party and non-Tea Party aligned Republicans tended to be equally fiscally conservative, GOP “legislators who make an effort to attach themselves to the Tea Party movement have significantly more conservative roll call voting records than fellow Republicans who are not attached to the Tea Party.” See Gervais, Bryan T. and Morris, Irwin L., Reactionary Republicanism: How the Tea Party in the House Paved the Way for Trump’s Victory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
56 Gervais and Morris, Reactionary Republicanism, 107.
57 Daniel Cox, “Why Loyalty to Their Tea Party Constituents is Holding Back House Republicans on Immigration Reform,” Public Religion Research Institute (blog), August 8, 2014, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.prri.org/spotlight/why-loyalty-to-their-tea-party-constituents-is-holding-back-house-republicans-on-immigration-reform/; Fox News, “Tea Party Groups Ramp Up Fight Against Immigration Bill, as August Recess Looms,” July 5, 2013, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tea-party-groups-ramp-up-fight-against-immigration-bill-as-august-recess-looms; Gervais and Morris, Reactionary Republicanism; Ed Kilgore, “The GOP’s ‘2012 Autopsy Report’ Is Now Officially Dead and Buried,” Intelligencer, February 9, 2016, accessed July 24, 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/gops-2012-autopsy-report-is-officially-dead.html; Seung Min Kim and Carrie Budoff Brown, “The Death of Immigration Reform,” Politico, June 27, 2014, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/how-immigration-reform-died-108374.
58 “‘Borders First’ a Dividing Line in Immigration Debate,” Pew Research Center, June 23, 2013, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/06/23/borders-first-a-dividing-line-in-immigration-debate/; John LaLoggia, “Trump’s Staunch GOP Supporters Have Roots in the Tea Party,” Pew Research Center, May 16, 2019, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/05/16/trumps-staunch-gop-supporters-have-roots-in-the-tea-party/; Geoffrey Kabaservice, “The Forever Grievance,” Washington Post, December 4, 2020, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/tea-party-trumpism-conservatives-populism/; Ron Elving, “Trump’s MAGA is Marching Down a Trail Blazed by the Tea Party,” NPR, May 21, 2022, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2022/05/21/1100386445/trumps-maga-is-marching-down-a-trail-blazed-by-the-tea-party; Samantha Smith, “Trump Supporters Differ from Other GOP Voters on Foreign Policy, Immigration Issues,” Pew Research Center, May 11, 2016, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/11/trump-supporters-differ-from-other-gop-voters-on-foreign-policy-immigration-issues/; Carroll Doherty, “5 Facts about Trump Supporters’ Views of Immigration,” Pew Research Center, August 25, 2016, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/25/5-facts-about-trump-supporters-views-of-immigration/.
59 “Immigration,” Gallup.
60 Feinstein and Schickler, “Platforms and Partners.”
61 Gamm et al., “The Culture War and Partisan Polarization.”
62 Christopher Hare and Keith T. Poole, “The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics,” Polity 46, no. 3 (2014): 411–29.
63 Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In; Hajnal, Zoltan and Abrajano, Marisa, “Trump’s All Too Familiar Strategy and Its Future in the GOP,” The Forum 14, no. 3 (2016): 295–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sebastian Parker, Christopher, “Status Threat: Moving the Right Further to the Right?,” Daedalus 150, no. 2 (2021): 56–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walters and Skocpol supplementary material
File
219.7 KB