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Abstract
Immigration has been a matter of debate since the genesis of America. The country was forged by immigrants. In contrast with Europe, America was formed under the presumption of an egalitarian and liberal way of living. A place where newcomers have equal opportunities as natives and a place where they could pursue happiness. However, as Toqueville acknowledged this conception was too narrow and only applies for immigrants with Anglo-Saxon Protestant origins.
By 1798, the Americans would already show a willingness to address unwanted immigration as the Alien and Sedition Act shows. American history shows that this anti-immigrant sentiment was not ephemeral; in 1855, Abraham Lincoln denounced that if the nativists had it their way the Declaration of Independence would be rewritten to read: "All men are created equal, except Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics". Later in time, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 tried to explicitly restrict immigration from Chinese immigrants who were partially being scapegoated as the source of unemployment during the Long Depression. The twentieth century saw the socalled “Wetback Act” in 1952, created to support the illegalization of Mexican workers and promote mass deportations of Mexican immigrants (Smith, 1995). More recently, Donald Trump’s flagship policy proposal was to build a physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico with the purpose to stop Mexican immigrants from stealing jobs and committing crimes on American soil.
Attitudes toward immigrants are not held homogenously among the American people. They change in time, place, and with respect to the immigrant group. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the reasons behind this variation in attitudes toward immigrants. My overarching hypothesis is that this phenomenon is driven by the different ways in which natives and immigrants interact in the economic and social spheres.
The main goal of this dissertation is to understand what drives attitudes towards immigration. Although my interests in the topic are broad, in the first chapter of this project I focus on the confluence of social and economic factors, and how they interact. In this study, I am interested in immigrants in general. In the second chapter, in contrast, I focus on undocumented immigrants and how changes in economic policy affect attitudes toward them.
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