Washington Insider: Kissing Up and Kicking Down

How toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric incentivizes some Latinos to favor mass deportation.

*this article was written for the Fall 2024 issue of the Washington College Magazine. 

Latino support for restrictive immigration policies is on the rise. While chants of “Build the wall!” are common among the predominantly white crowds at most Trump rallies, many were surprised to see them taken up by a largely Black and Latino audience in the South Bronx in late May. Several weeks later, a CBS/YouGov poll made waves by reporting that 53 percent of Latinos would support a Trumpian program of mass deportation. Although the results of this survey of only 144 Latinos should be taken with a grain of salt, the preponderance of polling data over the past few years suggests that there is a significant and growing minority of Latinos who are more conservative on immigration policy than often assumed. For example, an Axios/ Ipsos Poll of over 1,000 Latino participants found that support for the deportation of undocumented immigrants had increased from 28 percent in December 2021 to 38 percent in March 2024.

The existence of a politically conservative minority among the Latino electorate should not be terribly surprising. While pundits and politicians spent decades talking about Latinos as if they were a monolith, the cultural, linguistic, religious, and socio-economic diversity within these communities was obvious to anyone willing to pay attention. Although Latinos are disproportionately likely to identify as Democrats and support liberal policy positions, roughly one third of Latinos have supported Republican presidential candidates over the last several decades. While most Latinos support a pathway to citizenship and other progressive immigration policies, they, like other Americans, are more likely to regard the economy, crime, or healthcare as more salient political issues.

But while a subset of Latinos may prefer Republican positions on these or other issues, their support was believed to occur despite, rather than because of, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Although Latinos are not a single-issue voting bloc, most do view anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies as an implicit (and sometimes explicit) attack upon the Latino community writ large. These perceptions haven’t emerged in a vacuum but rather are a response to a decades-long effort by the Republican Party and conservative media outlets to characterize immigrants as an economic, security, and cultural threat to the United States. That this narrative materialized at a time when Latin America overtook Europe as the region of origin for the majority of immigrants has not been lost on these communities.

However, there is reason to believe that a significant minority of Latinos today support the Republican Party because of their hostility to immigrants. Earlier this year, my colleagues and I published a study in Public Opinion Quarterly reporting that a sizeable and growing minority (42 percent) of Latinos exhibit what we call “Latino Immigrant Resentment.” These. individuals have adopted many of the erroneous negative stereotypes of immigrants that have long been promoted by conservative actors (for example, immigrants increase crime, harm the economy, and are unwilling to culturally assimilate). More importantly, they blame immigrants for the hostile and discriminatory environment many Latinos face in the United States and express a desire for non- Latinos to stop conflating Latino with immigrant.

This behavior is reminiscent of what social psychologists refer to as the “Black Sheep Effect,” a tendency for individuals to more harshly judge members of their own social group who engage in “deviant” behavior than they would members of other social groups. Such behavior reflects both a belief that undocumented immigrants exacerbate the discriminatory context that Latinos in America face and a desire to clarify the distinction between immigrant and non-immigrant Latinos to other Americans. Supporting anti-immigrant policies and politicians becomes a very public way of signaling to other Americans that non-immigrant Latinos are their allies and should be treated as such.

Our analysis indicates that Latino Immigrant Resentment is a powerful predictor of support for restrictive immigration policies and politicians within the Latino electorate. As might be expected, these beliefs are more common among those who are several generations removed from the immigration experience. Such individuals may regard their family’s history of immigration as less important to their identity or view more recent arrivals as “different” than those who came to the U.S. in the past. Because the vast majority of Latinos in the United States are now a generation or more removed from the immigration experience, these tendencies are unlikely to dissipate.

The political significance of this phenomenon is real. The increasing support for restrictive immigration policies within the Latino community not only emboldens immigrant hardliners but also provided a permission structure for the Biden administration to adopt more restrictive asylum policies and abandon a path to citizenship as part of a failed legislative compromise with Congressional Republicans. Further, the widespread fear within Democratic circles that Trump was gaining traction among Latino voters because of, rather than in spite of, his harsh stance on immigration contributed to declining faith in the viability of the President’s 2024 campaign.

In focusing on the political outcomes of Latino Immigrant Resentment, one can easily lose sight of the fundamental ethical and moral questions its development raises. Ours is a society in which many Latinos feel that it is strategically advantageous to throw immigrants under the bus and that the only way to escape the stigma and discrimination leveled against Latinos is to join in on the scapegoating. Unfortunately, navigating marginalization in the United States sometimes involves kissing up and kicking down.

We should not sit in judgment over how individuals navigate their marginalized status in a racial/ethnic hierarchy. The more fundamental problem is the existence of this hierarchy and that many individuals feel compelled to make very difficult moral, ethical, and tactical decisions to survive and thrive under such conditions. While Latinos in the U.S. may have other reasons for supporting Trump and restrictive immigration policies, we cannot ignore the fact that for many, it is less about supporting the man or his agenda and more about escaping the stigma perpetuated by them.

- Flavio Hickel, Jr. is an assistant professor of political science at Washington College and a recent fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute. His scholarship has been published in Public Opinion Quarterly, Politics and Religion, and other peer-reviewed journals. His work and commentary has frequently been featured in The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Axios, Newsweek, and other media outlets.