title: Political rhetoric, immigration attitudes, and contemporary prejudice: a Mexican American dilemma.
abstract: The authors examined political candidates' social stereotypes of Mexican immigrants in mainstream media accounts. From those popular themes, they formed semantic differential scales, which they administered to participants (N = 201) with 1 of 4 scenarios describing an illegal immigrant: of Mexican vs. English Canadian descent and with vs. without several parking tickets. Consistent with contemporary theories of prejudice (J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner, 1996), the participants indicated the greatest agreement with the pejorative themes when the immigrant described was of Mexican descent and had accumulated parking tickets. Psychologically, the parking tickets served as a nonethnic rationale for discriminating against that ethnic group. The authors discuss the social and public policy implications of Mexican immigration as a political phenomenon.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe 85287-1104, USA. Robert.Short@ASU.edu
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Short
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Magaña
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D003415:Crime; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017058:Mexican Americans; D011057:Politics; D011287:Prejudice; D012924:Social Conditions