Jeronimo Cortina
Department of Political Science

Most previous studies have highlighted the economic, socioeconomic, cultural and/or nationalistic factors that help shape individual attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. Given the inherently ethnoracial element of immigration (people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds come to a predominantly non-Hispanic, white nation with substantive ethnic and racial minorities), it is surprising how little research has examined how the newcomer's ethnicity and race shape individual's attitudes toward immigration.

The findings of this research will suggest that contemporary attitudes toward race-neutral immigration among distinct U.S. racial and ethnic groups share similar trajectories. However, when immigration is framed in ethnic terms and when there is no ethnic and/or racial boundary-congruency between groups (immigrants and native-born), we would expect that the in-group would tend to make more negative affective evaluations about the out-group's members, which tend to be more easily identified after an event that significantly increases their saliency.