The Limits of Rights: Claims-making for Immigrants

Presented by the Department of Psychology, Political Science and Sociology and Anthropology

With Irene Bloemraad, Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies. 

ABSTRACT: Democracies espouse the ideal of equal political voice used to persuade others to advance particular collective projects. But in the contemporary period, claims-making is primarily legitimated for citizens. How can non-citizens make claims on the polity and have their appeals resonate among citizen voters? In the United States, pro-immigrant activists deploy rights language. Some advocates appeal to human rights, contending that no human is illegal; others appeal to civil rights, tapping a long tradition of militating for minorities’ full inclusion. But do rights-based appeals work to sway citizen voters? This presentation reports on survey experiments among registered California voters in 2016, asking about government responsibility for and action on behalf of an undocumented Mexican immigrant or a Mexican-American U.S. citizen. Respondents were randomly primed using the language of civil rights, human rights, American values or a control condition. Results suggest that California voters perceive undocumented immigrants to be categorically unequal and that rights language –whether couched in terms of human or civil rights – does not mitigate this categorical inequality. Surprisingly, “American values” generates the most sympathy, even for undocumented immigrants. This raises the implication that non-citizens must adhere to and make appeals on the very nationality they do not hold.