Legitimating Contexts, Immigrant Power, and Exclusionary Actions.

In multi-ethnic nation-states, opposition to immigration has manifested itself in attitudes and behaviors. Past research has typically focused on anti-immigrant attitudes, and relied on threat and competition theories to explain patterns in such attitudes. These theories suggest that perceived threats stemming from new influxes or large concentrations of immigrants should prompt dominant groups to protect their interests, leading to anti-immigrant attitudes. We extend the literature with a focus on anti-immigrant activity, and introduce the legitimating contexts model, which argues that dominant groups may actually hesitate to engage in exclusionary public actions in places where the political and demographic strength of immigrant and ethnic groups is strong. In contrast to theories of group threat, we contend that in contexts with low levels of immigrant political power and demographic strength, anti-immigrant activity is less likely to be noticed, let alone challenged, and thus more likely to become part of the status quo. Extending political opportunity theory, we also claim that conservative elites and voters in local areas coupled with low levels of threat further legitimate anti-immigrant activity. We test these ideas using a new data set of exclusionary action targeted at immigrants in over 50 U.S. metropolitan areas. In support of the legitimating contexts model, we find that low levels of demographic and political threat-when immigrants enjoy less power-alone and coupled with a higher share of conservative voters act to legitimate and encourage restrictive events on the part of noninstitutional actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]