Pulling Up the Ladder? Insecurity and Immigration Attitudes among Latino and Asian American Immigrants

Abstract

This study examines whether and how financial and identity insecurity shape nativist immigration attitudes among Latino and Asian American immigrants. While existing scholarship has drawn on linked fate, system justification, and respectability politics to explain variation in political attitudes within ethnic minority groups, less attention has been paid to the immigration experience itself. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), I employ factor analysis to construct latent measures of financial insecurity and identity insecurity and estimate structural equation models to assess their associations with immigration policy preferences and attitude towards immigrants. The baseline models reveal that financial insecurity predicts support for increased border security, but identity insecurity is associated with more inclusive rather than more restrictive attitudes, consistent with an in-group solidarity mechanism. Interaction models show that first-generation status attenuates in-group solidarity, and that the clearest evidence for an insecurity–nativism pathway emerges among first-generation immigrants who prioritized belonging as their motivation for migration. Among this group, status threat predicts support for border security and opposition to birthright citizenship, two policies that most directly police the boundaries of national membership. These findings suggest that insecurity does not uniformly promote nativism among Latino and Asian American immigrants, but can push toward either solidarity or distancing depending on generational status, immigration motivation, and policy domain.