UCLA

Across a number of politically relevant domains, Latinx immigrants and their co-ethnics hold progressive attitudes and preferences relative to Anglo whites despite countervailing pressure to assimilate to Anglo political standards. This dissertation includes three papers that explain the puzzle of relative political progressivism among Latinxs by highlighting the role of an increasingly threatening interior immigration enforcement context after the implementation of Clinton-era immigration restrictions. I posit many Latinx immigrants and their co-ethnics experience a \textit{generalized sense of illegality}, that is, a palpable fear of deportability. I theorize a generalized sense of illegality is motivated by 1) the increasing societal integration of undocumented immigrants, 2) an increasingly restrictive immigration enforcement context, and 3) the development of an ethnicized illegality attached to Latinx ethnic group members. I then demonstrate a sense of illegality maintains Latinx progressivism despite countervailing conservative forces. Chapter 1 demonstrates perceptibly threatening immigration enforcement contexts undercut well-established patterns of attitudinal convergence with Anglo whites on immigration policy preferences. Chapter 2 forwards a Dynamic Theory of Threat Solution Ownership to explain how the threat of deportation motivates support for Democratic candidates among Latinxs and partisan defection among Republican Latinxs specifically. Chapter 3 offers a theoretical framework to understand how the threat of deportation may motivate pro-Black political attitudes among non-Black Latinxs despite the perceptible lack of commonality in exposure to immigration enforcement.