Noncriminal Removals
Removal rate .586** .203 .187 .128 Native-born Latino .884 .503 .169 .453 Foreign-born Latino 2.391** .821 .545 .378 Native-born Latino # removal rate 2.761** .265 2.078 .208 Foreign-born Latino # removal rate 21.127* .486 .057 .199
Criminal Removals
Removal rate .084 .049 .019 .037 Native-born Latino .211 .376 2.293 .309 Foreign-born Latino 1.781* .737 .201 .462 Native-born Latino # removal rate 2.113* .044 .054 .032 Foreign-born Latino # removal rate 2.210 .107 .068 .095
Note—N p 470. Table entries are ordered logit estimates. All standard errors (SEs) are clustered by county. Dependent variable question wording is: “Public officials don’t care much what people like me think” (Disagree Strongly, Disagree Somewhat, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Agree Somewhat, Agree Strongly) and “Sometimes, politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on” (Disagree Strongly, Disagree Somewhat, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Agree Somewhat, Agree Strongly). * p ! .05. ** p ! .01.
910 / Immigration Enforcement and Trust Rene R. Rocha, Benjamin R. Knoll, and Robert D. Wrinkle
state-level estimates of deportation rates created by Warren and Warren (2013). The findings continue to show that im- migrant removal rates affect political orientations. Anglos feel most externally efficacious in areas with high removal rates. However, high removal rates are associated with less external efficacy among native- and foreign-born Latinos. Foreign- born Latinos are not more or less likely than Anglos to strongly disagree with the statement “public officials don’t care much what people like me think” when the removal rate is below 6 per 1,000. However, foreign-born Latinos are less likely than Anglos to strongly disagree after that point. The probability of a foreign-born Latino strongly disagreeing is 25% lower than that of an Anglo respondent in areas with the most removals (22 per 1,000).11
Is the effect of removals on political attitudes stronger among those who hold restrictionist attitudes on immi- gration? We reran our model of external efficacy on Anglo, native-born Latino, and foreign-born Latino subsamples. The model included an interaction term between the re- moval rate and restrictionist attitudes (measured as ex- pressing the belief that the number of immigrants entering the United States should be decreased). Restrictionist atti- tudes do significantly exaggerate the effect of removal rates for Anglos but not for Latinos. The Anglo subsample, not
surprisingly, contains the largest number of restrictionists. Removals increase the odds that an Anglo respondent will strongly disagree with the idea that “public officials don’t care what people like me think” only if the respondent also believes that the number of immigrants allowed into the United States should be “decreased a lot” or “decreased a little.” Expansionist Anglos do not feel better about gov- ernment when living in areas where the removal rate is high (see fig. 5). Feedback effects spillover when constructions are widely held. Anglos are more likely to negatively con- struct immigrants, and their political orientations improve when witnessing the punishment of deviant groups. But the effects are present only for those who accept prevailing constructions.
The effect of policy outcomes on internal efficacy is dif- ferent from what we have reviewed so far. Foreign-born status is not associated with less or more internal efficacy across any of the policy environments in our data. Neither is being a native-born Latino. Women express lower rates of internal efficacy, but other individual-level controls also are unrelated. Each of these results holds when we account for criminal and noncriminal removals separately. Soss (1999) also found that experience with policy programs affects ex- ternal and internal efficacy differently. Experiences that can lower rates of external efficacy can raise internal efficacy by forcing individuals to navigate cumbersome bureaucratic pro-11. This effect is also illustrated in the appendix.
Figure 5. Data come from ICE and a 2012 survey of Anglos and Latinos residing in Texas. The figure shows the conditional marginal effects of the variable
“Removal rate” on the probability of responding “Disagree Strongly” to the item “Public officials don’t care what people like me think.” The marginal effect of
“Removal rate” is modeled as being conditional on responses to the item “The number of immigrants allowed into the United States should be (increased a
lot, increased a little, remain about the same, decreased a little, decreased a lot).” The bands represent 95% confidence intervals.
Volume 77 Number 4 October 2015 / 911
cesses. We find that Latinos do not associate high rates of immigration enforcement with their own abilities to compre- hend political information. There are limits to theways inwhich policy implementation can affect political orientations.
DISCUSSION Schattschneider (1935) said, “New policies create new pol- itics,” and most policy theorists agree (Mettler and SoRelle 2014). We do too. But we also wanted to clarify how the process unfolds.
Positive or negative social constructions emerge when public policy allocates benefits or burdens (Schneider and Ingram 1993). These constructions are perceived and in- ternalized by target groups. This led us to argue that im- migration enforcement negatively constructs immigrants by signaling that they deserve to be sanctioned.
If the lessons from past work apply across issue areas, then immigrants likely respond to heavy-handed enforce- ment tactics by developing a deep sense of political alien- ation. Our work placed equal emphasis on a different ques- tion: How does policy change the attitudes of those who are not targeted? We suspected that linked fate ties the opinions of native-born Latinos to those of immigrants. Anglos, or the subset of Anglos who are restrictionists, were expected to enjoy more faith in political institutions when enforcement is tough because they prefer policy outcomes to reflect domi- nant constructions.
Our results, based on a survey of Texans and statistics provided by ICE, largely confirm these expectations. Higher levels of immigration enforcement, as measured by de- portations carried out as part of the Secure Communities program, are associated with negative political orientations among both native Latino and Latino immigrant popula- tions. The reverse is true for Anglos, and this effect is es- pecially pronounced when it comes to noncriminal re- movals. Like previous work (Abrajano and Alvarez 2010; Michelson 2003), we found that foreign-born Latinos hold distinct, often advantageous, attitudes. But this physiolog- ical advantage disappears in negative policy contexts. The government’s decision to increase immigration enforcement through the Secure Communities program socially margin- alizes the immigrant community and reinforces the dominant position of Anglos.
Ramping up enforcement levels of punitive immigration policies does not discourage unauthorized immigration (Mas- sey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Rocha et al. 2014). These policy efforts do increase the difficulty that US authorities face when trying to foster trust within immigrant communities. And the redistribution of political trust from Latinos to An- glos means that existing inequalities of voice will persist.
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