The Impact of Immigrant Mobilization on Immigration Policy Making

Immigration is one of the most contested and divisive political issues in the United States. Recent research on the determinants of immigration policy has drawn attention to the role of media framing, demographic change, and partisanship (Hopkins 2010, Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010). Existing studies, however, tend to neglect the agency that immigrant communities have in the arena of immigration policymaking. This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining the impact of immigrant mobilization on congressional voting behavior on immigration legislation from 2001-2010. We argue that immigrant mobilization is a key factor in the creation of immigration policy. We hypothesize that immigration policy is less restrictive in areas with higher levels of immigrant mobilization. Using new data on immigrant mobilization at the state and local level, we find some evidence supporting our hypothesis. The analysis shows that immigrant mobilization has uneven effects. In areas with small foreign-born populations, immigrant mobilization is not significantly related to congressional voting on immigration legislation. However, in areas with large, established foreign-born populations, immigration mobilization tends to be more intense and is negatively, significantly related to congressional voting on restrictive immigration legislation