title: Party Identification, Contact, Contexts, and Public Attitudes toward Illegal Immigration.
abstract: Illegal immigration is a contentious issue on the American policy agenda. To understand the sources of public attitudes toward immigration, social scientists have focused attention on political factors such as party identification; they have also drawn on theories of intergroup contact to argue that contact with immigrants shapes immigration attitudes. Absent direct measures, contextual measures such as respondents' ethnic milieu or proximity to salient geographic features (such as borders) have been used as proxies of contact. Such a research strategy still leaves the question unanswered - is itcontactorcontextthat really matters? Further,whichcontext, andfor whom? This article evaluates the effects of party identification, personal contact with undocumented immigrants, and contextual measures (county Hispanic population and proximity to the US-Mexico border) on American attitudes toward illegal immigration. It finds that contextual factors moderate the effects of political party identification on attitudes toward illegal immigration; personal contact has no effect. These findings challenge the assumption that contextual measures act as proxies for interpersonal contact.
authors.affiliation: T imothy B. G ravelle is a doctoral student in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK, and Manager, Modeling and Analytics, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2015 Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Hollywood, Florida, USA, and the 2015 Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The author thanks Scott Keeter and Kyley McGeeney of the Pew Research Center for facilitating access to the data set and for answering questions about the survey methodology, as well as Thomas Scotto and the three anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions.
authors.forename: Timothy B
authors.initials: TB
authors.lastname: Gravelle