Daniela Alvarez – Immigration Politics, Policymaking in the U.S.

Author: Daniela Alvarez

Don’t Stop, Don’t Give In: Why Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell Must Continue to be a Vocal Voice on Immigration Policymaking.

May 17, 2019 / Daniela Alvarez / 0 Comments

Summary:

Do you remember when Debbie-Mucarsel Powell unseated the two-term Republican incumbent in Florida House District 26’s highly contested election? Yeah, I do too, and I’ve spent a semester looking at how some critical features of the district like demographics and partisanships’ influence immigration policymaking in FL-26. These demographics along with existing literature on immigration provide some context as to how Representative Mucarsel-Powell can adequately perform the job she was elected to do—be an advocate for all her constituents at the national level—and still be reelected come 2020. Important characteristics of the district like it’s large Hispanic/Latino population, 50/50 split between the native and foreign-born population and lack of party strength help predict in what ways and to what extent Representative Mucarsel-Powell, the first South American immigrant elected to Congress, will be responsive when it comes to immigration. Since taking office earlier this year, so far, she has demonstrated that she will be a strong and powerful voice that is willing to push back against legislation that disfavors her constituents. Although representative Mucarsel-Powell has not had the chance to vote directly on an immigration bill, we can look at her active advocacy for the Venezuelan community and resistance to family separation and the detainment of migrant children as a proxy for what her legislative plan for immigration will be. After presenting, my claims supported by existing research, I suggest that she continues to be a powerful voice in the immigration dialogue, vote for immigration reform when the chance comes, and keep calling out and acting against the hateful rhetoric and policies that target and dehumanize immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants.

Op-ed:

Don’t Stop, Don’t Give In: Why Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell Must Continue to be a Vocal Voice on Immigration Policymaking.

When I think about South Florida—the place that welcomed me 16 years ago and I’m lucky to call home—my mind instantly pictures the immigrant communities, particularly from the Carribean and Latin America, that serve as the backbone of the region. Culturally, at times it feels more like we’re living in the Caribbean or Latin American than in the U.S. because immigrants play an integral part of the broader South Florida community and have created neighborhoods like Little Havana. Politically, Latinos and Hispanics comprise a significant share of the electorate, and in Florida politics, their vote can determine the outcome in highly contended races.

Talking about highly contended congressional races, remember when Debbie-Mucarsel Powell unseated the two-term Republican incumbent in Florida House District 26? Yeah, I do too, and I’ve spent an entire semester looking at how some critical features of the district like demographics and partisanships’ influence immigration policymaking. This helps consider how Representative Mucarsel-Powell can adequately perform the job she was elected to do—be an advocate for all her constituents at the national level—and still be reelected come 2020.

Before we get into specific policy predictions, let’s get a glimpse of who Mucarsel-Powell is representing. FL-26 is a Hispanic dense district, with 72.3% of the 2017 population identifying of Hispanic or Latino origin, 15.8% white, 9.7% Black or African American and 2.2% Asian. Within the Hispanic community, the majority of the district Hispanics are either Cuban or from another Hispanic background, which I presume to be mostly from Central and South American countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, and El Salvador. In the past five years, there has been a slight 3.8% decrease in the white population, and an equaled 3.8 increase in the Hispanic population. It is essential to consider not only the size and growth of the Hispanic population but also the make-up of it as it relates to the effects it has on public opinion amongst whites, which can pressure the representative to vote in a certain way.

According to Abrajano and Hajnal, white Americans are somewhat responsive to the growth of the immigrant population, but they’re more influenced by the overall size of the Latino population. This signals, that because of the large population, white Americans in FL-26 might favor more restrictive policies on immigration. However, Abrajano and Hajnal cited research that finds that the immigrant threat narrative targets Mexican immigration, and is less concerned about other Latino national groups like Puerto Ricans and Cubans, which there are far more of in the district.

That’s one layer of the demographics in the district, but we can get even more insight by looking at the foreign-born and native population. Currently, the district is evenly split (50/50) with about 40 more foreign-born individuals than native-born, and about 94% of the foreign-born population coming from Latin America. Another critical split to consider is partisanship; in this district, of party-affiliated voters, half are Republicans and the other half are Democrats. There is no denying that FL-26 is a battleground district, and that brings forth important electoral considerations for any representative of the district.

Other important components are that 58% of the foreign-born population are naturalized citizens, and 72.3% of the people in the district speak a language other than English (which means there either bilingual or monolingual of another language, most likely Spanish given the district demographics) and 27.7% only speak English. This explains why so many of Representative Mucarsel-Powell’s tweets and interviews are in Spanish and is another indicator of her responsiveness and inclusiveness of the Hispanic/Latino population.

All of these important characteristics help predict in what ways and to what extent Representative Mucarsel-Powell, the first South American immigrant elected to Congress, will be responsive when it comes to immigration. Since taking office earlier this year, so far, she has demonstrated that she will be a strong and powerful voice that is willing to push back against legislation that disfavors her constituents. Although representative Mucarsel-Powell has not had the chance to vote directly on an immigration bill, we can look at her active advocacy for the Venezuelan community and resistance to family separation and the detainment of migrant children as a proxy for what her legislative plan for immigration will be.

Tom Wong’s 2017 research shows how immigrants play a determinative role in shaping policy outcomes by shifting median voter preferences away from policy restrictiveness. This provides a lense as to how Representative Mucarsel-Powell might face some challenges as she attempts to balance some of the splits in her districts’ demographics. Wong’s theory assumes that representatives are going to play the median voter strategy to capture the median voter and win re-election. On her campaign website, Mucarsel-Powell lists her policy proposals on immigration, and we can see that they are very targeted at the immigrant communities present in her district. She’s in favor of immigration reform, but we can see how she differs from the Democrats, that typically supports a more comprehensive and broader immigration agenda. She does not want to establish a comprehensive path to citizenship, at least not explicitly; what she wants is to create a path to citizenship for DREAMers. Her current policy proposal seems very conditional and will apply only to immigrants that fall within specific categories, and this seems like her way of balancing the dynamics in her district. However, I think her ability to unseat Curbelo, and the upward trend in the foreign population, which Wong claims will move the location of the median voter, gives her opportunity down the line—if she holds on to her seat—to advance even more liberal legislation on immigration that supports immigrants in more ways.

Now turning to Casellas and Leal’s 2013 research. Here, they examined the interaction of partisanship, constituencies, and member characteristics on the member of Congress’ voting behavior on immigration. They concluded that partisanship is the only consistent factor and that district demographics and the personal attributes of the member of Congress were not consistently associated with votes. Mucarsel-Powell seems to be the antithesis to this, she ran on a platform that highlights that she’s an immigrant and since taking office, has used her connection to Latin America to take a firm stance against Trump’s hateful and criminalizing rhetoric against immigrants from that region. One of the few bills that she’s sponsored, which passed, gave humanitarian assistance to Venezuelans both inside and outside the country. Of the 300,00 Venezuelans living in the U.S., 200,000 live in South Florida, so it’s not surprising that a coalition of Democratic congresswoman from South Florida have pushed for Venezuelans to be granted temporary protected status and cease the deportation of non-criminal migrants, which is the most humane thing to do given the crisis in Venezuela.

The real test for Debbie-Mucarsel Powell will come when immigration-related issues aren’t at the forefront of the national agenda, which I quite frankly don’t believe will ever happen under the current administration, but that will show if she’s genuine about being an advocate and supporter of this community or if she’s doing it just because it might be political suicide back home if she doesn’t. I find myself believing that she’s honest in her intentions to help immigrants and that FL-26 is lucky to have her as their representative. I suggest that she continues to be a powerful voice in the immigration dialogue, vote for immigration reform when the chance comes, and keep calling out and acting against the hateful rhetoric and policies that target and dehumanize immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants.

I pledge your honor that this paper represents my own work in accordance with university regulations.

-Daniela Alvarez

Media Content Analysis: Spanish and English News Coverage of the Government Shutdown in FL-26

May 14, 2019 / Daniela Alvarez / 0 Comments

Slide #1:

Hypothesis FL-26 is characterized as a Hispanic heavy district with 72% of the population identifying as Hispanic or Latino. The literature indicates that large Hispanic populations will most likely lead to more Latino-related issues covered in local media outlets. Additionally, 27% of the people in the district speak only English, which means that the majority of the people speak another language or are bilingual and given the districts demographics, that other language is most likely Spanish. Research suggests that based on these characteristics—the large Hispanic population and the language(s) spoken in the district— in FL-26, there will be more people seeking Spanish news in addition to English, which according to Abrajano and Singh results in the majority of the people in the district accessing news with more pro-immigrant sentiments. With this in mind, for my media content analysis, I’ll examine the coverage of the federal government shutdown and border wall funding debate in two local news sources, one in English and one in Spanish. I predict that the Spanish media coverage of the government shutdown will have a higher focus on the immigration relationship of the shutdown than the English media coverage of the shutdown because the English media wouldn’t want to alienate the native population, and thus will utilize frames that highlight the economic and/or security themes of the shutdown. I make this hypothesis based on Branton and Dunaway’s findings that support how ethnic context is significantly related to newspaper coverage of immigration. The results in his study showed that as the county-level percent Latino increases, the volume of coverage regarding immigration increase until it reaches a point, where it begins to decline. Additionally, I hypothesize that due to the distinct audiences that both newspapers are targeting linguistically, I expect the English media coverage to have a more negative bias present about immigrants, which in the context of the shutdown we can look at as support for building the wall. Furthermore, I predict that the Spanish media will have a more positive bias in their coverage of immigration (advocates against building the wall). I base this hypothesis off of Abrajano and Singh’s finding that when it comes to the issues of immigration, the content varies for English and Spanish news outlets, with more of a negative bias present in English news broadcasts and a more positive bias in Spanish news segments.

Slide #2:

Description of Data To test my predictions, I will use news articles published in The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald from December 11, 2018, to January 31, 2019. I chose these two news outlets, The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, because I wanted to compare how they both covered the government shutdown given that they are both targeting two linguistically different audiences. One targets the native population that could feel threatened by the high Hispanic/Latino population in the district and the other targets Latinos and Latino immigrants themselves. Both of these outlets publish daily in South Florida, and it’s particularly interesting that they’re sister papers because this will show more clearly how the different audiences influence not only how the government shutdown is covered, but also what aspect of the shutdown is being more emphasized in both of these news outlets.

To identify and gather the relevant news articles, I used the following search terms:immigration/inmigración, Immigrant/inmigrante, shutdown/cierre de gobierno, border wall/ muro, undocumented/indocumentado, and security/seguridad. The articles were then classified and characterized in two ways, by tone and frame in an excel sheet that I created to keep track of all the articles. Methodologically I followed a similar approach to Branton and Dunaway’s count measure of the number of articles published per news organization per month that focus on Latino immigration, but instead, I did a count measure of the total numbers of articles posted by each news outlets during the timeline I mentioned earlier and the search terms. Then, to look at the tone, I coded the articles with either a -1, 0 or 1, following a similar method to that one used by Florine Evans in “The Content and Tone of the Media Coverage with regard to the Refugee Crisis in Dutch Popular and Quality Newspapers over time.” The article received a -1 if the article favored a Pro-Democrat position on the shutdown, which more or less meant an article that advocating against building the border wall and for a deal for the Dreamers. The article was coded as a 0 if the article took a neutral position and/or the article was ambiguous and I wasn’t able to distinguish the position the article favored. Finally, I coded with a 1 any article that favored a Pro-Trump position on the shutdown, which more or less supported building the border wall. I decided to analyze tone as pro-Trump or pro-Democrats, which is kind of a proxy for a positive or negative view on the shutdown. To look at the frames, I categorized each article into one of four frames: security, economic, racist and human interest. A security frame noted keywords/phrases like better/stronger border protection, threat, crisis and dangerous. If the article focused on the impact of the shutdown on local businesses and funding of the border wall, it was assigned the economic frame. I categorized articles as having a racist frame if it spoke negatively of immigrants using words like the “other” or “different.” And, then a human interest frame featured a “human face” and/or tried to emphasize how individuals and/or groups were being affected by the shutdown like the “dreamers.”

Slide #3:

Results The complete data set includes a total of 67 news stories, 39 from The Miami Herald and 28 from El Nuevo Herald. First, I’ll look at the results for the tone of the media coverage. In the Miami Herald, the local news outlet published in English, 46% of the coverage was neutral, 44% of the articles supported the pro-Democrats position on the shutdown, and 10% favored Donald Trump’s position on the shutdown. In the Spanish news outlet, El Nuevo Herald, 57% of the articles endorsed a pro-Democrat position on the shutdown, 39% of the articles reported neutral news and 4% supported a pro-Trump position. I think it’s important to note that in both news outlets, the news was reported from an unbiased perspective in the majority of the articles except in El Nuevo Herald, where the tone favored more the pro-Democrat position. I think the reason why a neutral tone is prevalent is that a lot of the articles that I analyzed, I noticed focused on data about previous shutdowns, statistics and just facts and updates about the shutdown. Also, looking back at my excel sheet, I noticed some overlap in articles characterized as having a neutral tone, also having an economic focus. I think this is the case because data-driven information is harder to skew in one way or another, so the results lead to a more neutral tone. However, it is also critical to notice how in the Miami Herald there were slightly more articles with a pro-Trump tone, although this tone was the minority in both news outlets. In regards to the frames/themes of coverage, the results indicate that the most frequently used theme in both news outlets were the economic and human-interest frames. The Miami Herald, almost half of the time, focused on the economic consequences/side of the shutdown, with a greater emphasis on it than in El Nuevo Herald. The frame most used by El Nuevo Herald was human-interest as they focused their coverage more on the people being affected by the shutdown, specifically dreamers, immigrants, and federal employees. The security theme was used almost equally in both news outlets. The racist frame was used the least out of all the frames, but it was utilized twice as much in El Nuevo Herald, and from what I noticed as I gathered the data, it was used to highlight Trump’s negative attitude towards immigrants, mainly Mexican and Latino immigrants.

Slide #4:

Discussion and Conclusion My results support most of the claims I made in my first hypothesis. The results supported that the Miami Herald’s most used frame was the economic theme, but there was no support for my claim that the security theme would be more prevalent in the English news outlets given that it was used almost with the same frequency in the articles published by El Nuevo Herald. Referring back to the theoretical explanation that I built my hypothesis on, I believe there is some support here as well as to the behavior of the Miami Herald to support Branton & Dunaway’s claim that as the percent of Latino increases, the volume of coverage in English news outlets regarding immigration increases until it reaches a point of decline. I think the fact that most of the news in The Miami Herald is covered in a neutral tone possibly shows how a local newspapers in a largely Hispanic district with almost an even split in party identification tries to balance all of these characteristics not to alienate any group, because I mean their end goal is to make money. In regards to my second hypothesis, which focused more on the tone of the articles, there is support that in English media outlets there will be more negative bias about immigrants and in Spanish media coverage, there will be more positive bias about immigrants. The results showed how in El Nuevo Herald, more than half the articles published were from a pro-Democrats tone and in The Miami Herald, the pro-Trump position was favored more than in El Nuevo Herald. This aligns with similar findings in Abrajano and Sings research, although there was limited to television news segments. Overall, this research shows more evidence that the language that news is delivered in, given that it’s targeting a specific audience plays a role not only in regards to what content is covered by the news outlet but the tone and frame that the content is delivered in.

FL-26 Population Demographics

April 15, 2019 / Daniela Alvarez / 0 Comments

Slide 1: FL-26 is a Hispanic heavy district with 72.3% of the 2017 population identifying as Hispanic or Latino origin, 15.8% white, 9.7% Black or African American and 2.2% Asian. Within the Hispanic population, the majority of the district Hispanics are either Cuban (~39%) or from another Hispanic background (~23%) and about ~ 5% are Mexican, and ~4 are Puerto Rican. When comparing the population change in the district, I calculated the difference between 2012 (when the district was redrawn; FL-25 was the closest geographically for the 2007 figures) and 2017. Although, I think it’s important to note that there isn’t any significant difference between the 2007 and 2012 population demographics. The only significant change in those five years is a slight 3.8% decrease in the white population, and an equaled 3.8 increase in the Hispanic population. Now, when we look at the foreign-born and native population in the district, we see an upward trend in the foreign-born population. Currently, the district is evenly split (50/50) with about 40 more foreign-born individuals. This rate is more than double the 20.9% foreign-born rate in Florida and 13.% rate in the U.S.Of the foreign-born population, 94% come from Latin America. Within the foreign-born population, in both 2012 and 2017, around 58% are naturalized U.S. citizens which shows a significant increase from 2007 when about 49% were naturalized. I also looked at the languages spoken in the district, and found that 72.3% speak a language other than English (which means there either bilingual or monolingual of another language, most likely Spanish given the district demographics) and 27.7% only speak English.

Slide 2: To look at how characteristics of the local population and the changes in these characteristics affect immigrant experiences, media coverage of immigration and public opinion on immigration, we turn to the literature. Fernandez-Kelly finds that immigrants living in spaces shared with people from the same backgrounds and who face similar challenges feel a sense of comfort in that community. We can expect to see in districts with large Latino populations more immigrant integration into the community, and the community will be reflective of this population as well, possibly with restaurants or festivals that celebrate the cultures of the immigrant community. When we look at the media Coverage of immigration, the language the news is covered in, the volume of the coverage, and the size of the Latino population are all factors to consider. Abrajano and Singh found that Latinos relying on both Spanish and English news have a higher likelihood of possessing pro-immigrant sentiments than Latinos who only use English news sources. When it comes to the volume of news coverage, among non border state residents like those in Florida, more immigrant news coverage leads to more dramatic shifts of opinion when compared to residents in border states (Dunaway et al. 2010). Dunaway also concludes that a larger Latino population leads to more considerable attention to Latino-related issues in local media outlets like immigration, which tends to be a synonym of being Hispanic or Latino. In regards to the effects on public opinion, Abrajano and Hajnal concluded that white Americans are somewhat responsive to the growth of the immigrant population, but there are more influenced by the overall size of the Latino population. They also cite research that finds that the immigrant threat narrative targets Mexican immigration, and is less concerned about other Latino national groups like Puerto Ricans and Cubans.

Slide 3: Based on the characteristics of the FL-26 population, we can predict that immigrants, particularly those from Hispanic/Latino origin will have a more positive immigrant experience and feel more connected to their community due to the mostly Hispanic and foreign-born population. The local coverage of immigration in this district is expected to feature more Latino-related issues like immigration. Also, given that only 23% of the population speaks only English and therefore will seek just English news, the remaining 72.3% of the district who speaks a language other than English, and given the district population characteristics probably speak Spanish, there will be more people seeking Spanish news. Given all of this, I would expect the majority of the people in the district to access news that features a more pro-immigrant sentiment. White Americans in this district, which are a small subset of the population will be more influenced by the large Latino population than the growth of the immigrant population. However, we must also note that there is an overlap between being white and being an immigrant in this district, so the influence probably won’t be so significant in this particular district. Also, in this district, individuals will be more receptive of Cuban immigrants than Mexican immigrants, who are usually the ones portrayed in the immigrant threat narrative.

Slide 4: The prediction that I’m testing is that that given the large Hispanic/Latino population in FL-26 is indicative that the Spanish media coverage of the government shutdown will have a higher focus on immigration than the English media coverage of the shutdown. To do this, I plan to compare the media coverage of the January government shutdown in an English and Spanish local news outlet. I will examine the news coverage starting on December 11, 2018, when news outlets began to report that President Trump would shut down the government after a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer up until February 1st, 2019, a week after the government reopened. The local media outlets I’ve decided would be more fruitful to look at are the Miami Herald, which publishes daily in South Florida in English, and El Nuevo Herald, which also publishes daily but in Spanish. As you probably noted in the name, these newspapers are sister papers, but they target different audiences. Also, I considered looking at the news articles published online from Univision and an English news outlet like CBS Miami, so I would like to get your feedback on that. Additionally, I could also try to compare the news from the Heralds with Spanish and English news from a district similar to FL-26. To gather the media content, I’ll use the following search terms: government shutdown/cierre de gobierno, border wall/muro, border/frontera, border security/seguridad en la frontera, immigration/inmigración and crisis. To look at the salience of the coverage, I’ll calculate the # of articles posted about the shutdown and categorizes them by frame. I’ll look for the following frames that the coverage could have embraced: whether Trump or the Democrats are to blame for the shutdown, whether the shutdown is a small price to pay for border security or whether it was framed to stress the millions of government employees who were working without pay. For the tone of the content, I’ll focus on the types of words utilized in the articles. Although I think this is an interesting research plan that I would like to pursue, I will also be interested in focusing my media content analysis on the coverage of the family separation policy. Fl-26 encompasses Homestead where there is one of the detention centers holding migrants, so I would like to dive more into that kind of media coverage from Spanish and English news outlets.

Dueling Coverage of the Migrant Caravan

April 10, 2019 / Daniela Alvarez / 2 Comments

This week we discussed how the media’s coverage of immigration could affect the consumer’s attitudes about immigration. The article I choose highlights the difference in coverage of the migrant caravan by MSNBC and Fox News, which are both very loud mainstream media partisan voices on the left and right of the political spectrum. Therefore, I don’t think it’s necessarily shocking the way each framed the caravan and the tone of their coverage—MSNBC utilized words like asylum and emphasized the women and children in the caravan while FoxNews labeled it as an invasion that’s going to bring in criminal activity. One thing I found interesting was the frequency of the reporting on the caravan, particularly by FoxNews before the midterm elections. MSNBC coverage wasn’t so focused in on the caravan as it was on how Republicans were benefiting from it until the tear-gas incident at the border. I think the human-interest aspect of the caravan and timing of it drove media coverage, what other factors do you think could have been driving media coverage of the caravan, and more broadly, what factors do you think drive media coverage of immigration?

I also added a FoxNews video that I came across because as expected it promotes this narrative that the caravan is full of mob members that are trying to invade the country. Interesting enough they attempt to show the other face of immigration by interviewing a legal immigrant from Hungary and then, highlighting that an illegal immigrant murdered her son. In the video, they don’t mention where the illegal immigrant was from, but they casually say that he was a gang member and fled to Mexico. I think this is an example of group association, as they’re trying to categorize illegal immigrants as Latinos, more specifically as Mexicans that are coming here to commit crimes and without a legitimate reason to seek asylum.

Article: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/media/reliable-sources-10-18-18/index.html

Video: https://video.foxnews.com/v/5852293465001/#sp=show-clips

Discussion Questions:

Do you think that the pre-existing views of FoxNews and MSNBC audiences drive their coverage of immigration-related events or does their media coverage influence the views of their audience?
In Abrajano et. al, they discuss how generational status influences Latinos’ immigration attitude, do you think that immigrating legally or illegally affects views on immigration as well?

FL 26 – Debbie Mucarsel-Powell

March 7, 2019 / Daniela Alvarez / 0 Comments

Here is the link to the other slides: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/my-drive

Slide 1:

As a result of redistricting following the 2010 Census, parts of Florida District 25 became part of a new district—Florida District 26. The new congressional district stretches from the southern tip of Florida to the western Miami suburbs, including the Florida Keys and all three of the state’s National parks (the Everglades, Biscayne and the Dry Tortugas) and encompassing portions of Monroe and Miami-Dade County. In 2012, the first election served as a rematch between Republican David Rivera, the former Representative of District 25 before it’s renumbering, and Democrat Joe Garcia. Both previously ran in District 25, which had always elected a Republican representative, but now they were running in a battleground district that equally splits between Democrats and Republicans. Garcia defeated Rivera by a 10% margin. The following election (2014), Republican Carlos Curbelo beat then-incumbent Garcia by a 3% margin, flipping the seat red. Then, in 2016, it is important to note that Curbelo managed to win his reelection campaign by 11.8%, while his district voted 56.7% in favor of Clinton and 40.6% in support of Trump. He once again faced Garcia as an opponent. Recently, in one of the most watched races of the 2018 election cycle, Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell beat the two-term incumbent by 1.8% of the votes, showing once again how close the elections in the district are. In my opinion, what tipped the scale in favor of Mucarsel-Powell was Healthcare and Curbelo’s vote to repeal Obamacare. Also, important to note, is that both Curbelo and Mucarsel-Powell are Hispanic, Curbelo is the son of Cuban exile parents and Mucarsel-Powell is an immigrant herself from Ecuador, and the district is majority Hispanic.

*The above election results were accessed from the New York Times.

Slide 2:

As a lens for analyzing the characteristics that influence immigration policymaking, I will refer to scholarship from Jason Casellas, David Leal and Tom Wong. In “Partisanship or population? House and Senate Immigration votes in the 109th and 110th Congress” Casellas and Leal offer insight into how partisanship, constituency composition, and the characteristics of the member of Congress influence how the member of Congress votes on immigration bills. In the article, Casellas and Leal conclude that partisanship is the only consistent factor of influence and more specifically, that partisanship of the member has a larger role in shaping immigration voting than the district partisanship. They also concluded that district demographics and the personal attributes of the member of Congress were not consistently associated with votes, which personally I am a bit skeptical of this conclusion. Additionally, their results showed that the newer a representative is to Congress and given the framework that will be up for reelection very shortly, the representative will be worried that voting against restrictive measures now might come back to hurt them electorally later on. Regarding district composition, they reason that the percentage of African-Americans in the district does not increase the likelihood of a representative supporting either comprehensive or restrictive immigration. Wong’s article on “The Politics of Interior Immigration Enforcement” provides additional scholarship on the influence of the district population. Specifically, that the size of the Hispanic/Latino percentage of the total population in a district is significantly related to a decreased likelihood of supporting legislation that tightens interior immigration enforcement for both Republican and Democratic Representatives. These are the themes that we will see at play in the next slide.

Slide 3:

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is the first Ecuadorian-American and the first South American immigrant elected to Congress and is currently serving her first term in Congress. She represents a district that according to American FactFinder is 69.7% Hispanic or Latino of any race and 10.7% Black or African American. Also, according to American FactFinder, 47.8% of the population is foreign-born, with a little more than half being Naturalized U.S. Citizen and the other half not. Furthermore, she is a Democrat, and thus far she has voted only 2/106 times with the Republicans. With these characteristics in mind (an immigrant herself, first-term in Congress, large Hispanic/Latino district population, closely aligned with the Democratic party), Congresswoman Mucarsel-Powell will vote against restrictionist policies and support immigration reform legislation because there will be more pressure from her district given that 47.4% of her constituents are foreign-born and 69.7 are Hispanic/Latino. I also predict that although immigration reform will be a big part of her agenda, given her background and district composition, her immigration proposals will advocate for policy approaches that are conditional on the immigrant or host country meeting specific criteria. I think we will see that she will not personally promote the Democratic agenda that typically supports more comprehensive and broader-applied reform, especially when it comes to “amnesty” oriented legislation. I think this will be the case given that FL District 26 is a battleground district will an equally split population of Republicans and Democrats, where she won by a tiny margin.

Slide 4:

So far Congresswoman Mucarsel-Powell has not voted or (co)sponsored any immigration bill directly, but she has voted to terminate Trump’s national emergency declaration. She has only sponsored two pieces of legislation; the first would provide humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people, including Venezuelan migrants and refugees in the Americas. Here, we see her pursuing one of her campaign proposals on immigration and appealing to her Venezuelan constituency, which is growing due to the crisis in Venezuela. On her campaign website, Mucarsel-Powell listed eight priorities with immigration being #4 on her list. In the subsection she provided for each of her priorities, each section had about the same amount of content, maybe 1 or 2 sentences more on immigration over another critical priority, but nothing significant. Additionally, I would argue that under the immigration subheading, she establishes clear and straightforward policy goals, which she does not do for the other sections. One of her policy proposals is that she wants to protect the asylum process for those who need it most, including those who have recently arrived from Venezuela and Nicaragua. Hence, some connection to her first sponsored bill. She also expresses her support for a path to citizenship for DREAMers and allowing TPS holders to become permanent residents. This goes back to my earlier policy predictions on how the representative will approach immigration policymaking. She is in favor of immigration reform, but we can see how she differs from the Democrats. She does not want to establish a comprehensive path to citizenship, at least not explicitly; what she wants is to create a path to citizenship for DREAMers. Her policy proposals are very targeted and inclusive of the immigrant communities of her district. On the other hand, on her official House of Representatives website, she only lists six issues and excludes immigration and gun safety, another of her key policy priorities. However, on both sites, she highlights her personal connection to immigration. After examining her twitter feed, it appears that Representative Mucarsel-Powell has not been very active with only 61 total tweets since beginning her term and only four of those are immigration related. However, I would like to point out that recently there has been a few tweets from the representative addressing Temporary Protected Status and with the word “migrant,” that I did not factor in but are immigration-related. She has signaled that her #1 priority in Congress is Healthcare, which she has only tweeted about once since taking office. Therefore, I do not think the low percentage (6.6%) of immigration-related tweets signal that it is no longer a top priority now that she is in Congress. Comparably, she also only had four tweets during her election campaign out of more tweets then I could calculate, but the percentage would have been significantly lower. Some of her immigration-related tweets have called out President Trump for utilizing the government as a bargaining chip and called the wall “wasteful.” Her tweets tend to push forth this message that she is open to addressing border security, but that the wall is not a solution. She also expressed this sentiment publicly when interviewed by Freebeacon on January 10th, where she stated “I can tell you that the homeland security bill includes billions of dollars for border security. What we cannot do is fund something that does not make sense.”