Samantha Goerger – Immigration Politics, Policymaking in the U.S.

Author: Samantha Goerger

NY-14 & TX-18 Presentation

May 16, 2019 / Samantha Goerger / 2 Comments

By Tori Gorton and Samantha Goerger

Abstract:

Despite the 1600 mile separation and drastically different state politics, two congressional districts from New York and Texas are surprisingly similar in regards to their action and inaction on the question of immigration. To explore the next steps in immigrant policymaking, we compared NY14 and TX18, situated in New York City and Houston, respectively. Both seats have been Democratic strongholds for at least the last 10 years. Demographically, NY14’s population is 47% foreign born and 76% non-white, while TX18’s population is 23% foreign born and 84% non-White. According to extant research on demographics and immigrant representation, NY14 and TX18 should have permissive and comprehensive immigration reform policies. While both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY14) and Shelia Jackson Lee (TX18) hold extremely liberal views on immigration, we find the articulation of said views to be lacking. We, therefore, propose that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sheila Jackson Lee better represent their local immigrant populations through increased vocalization of immigration-related issues, expanding the already extensive welfare programs to aid immigrant integration in NY14, and pushing for TX18 to become a sanctuary city. Despite the aforementioned counter-arguments, we believe that our representatives could better represent on immigration by centering the needs of their immigrant communities. Expanding access to welfare, being more vocal about immigrant needs, and adopting sanctuary city policies would foster a safer, fairer, and more welcoming environment for their constituents.

Safety in Numbers?

Pushing for greater representation of immigrant interests in NY14 & TX18

NY14 contains two NYC neighborhoods: Astoria and the Bronx. It is currently represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a freshman Democrat in the House of Congress. TX18 contains much of inner city Houston as well as a significant portion of the greater metropolitan area. It is currently represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat who has held the district’s congressional seat since 1995. Both seats have been Democratic strongholds for at least the last 10 years. Demographically, NY14’s population is 47% foreign born and 76% non-white, while TX18’s population is 23% foreign born and 84% non-White. Despite TX18 having a distinctly lower foreign born population than NY14, both are considered large in comparison to the national level of 13% foreign born. In addition, the population of TX18 is younger than that of NY14, similarly educated, and of slightly lower income. Aside from some small differences, the two districts are relatively comparable; however, they are disparate in their geographic context with TX18 being far more proximate to the southern border and in a Republican state, while NY14 is far removed from country borders and situated in a Democratic state.

Extant research shows that the size of the Latinx population is negatively correlated with support for strict enforcement of immigration laws. Democrats have also been found to be less likely to favor restrictive immigration policies. Research also shows that districts with large minority populations are less likely to apply for 287(g) – a punitive federal program that provides training for local law enforcement to become able to facilitate ICE procedures. Moreover, members of Congress who identify as a race other than White are more likely to support permissive immigration policy. Finally, members of Congress in areas that have seen protests on the issue of immigration are more likely to be supportive of permissive policy. Both TX18’s and NY14’s characteristics, demographics, and histories – i.e. their high Latinx population, Democratic members of Congress, large minority populations, non-White representatives, and experience with protests (May Day in both, June 2018) – align with the aforementioned research to predict that their members of Congress will be very likely to back permissive immigration policy. For both members of Congress, 7% of their bill (co)sponsorships from the current Congress are focused on immigration and all bills can be considered as permissive, if not comprehensive.

In spite of this, there is a clear gap between the supposed progressiveness of AOC’s and Lee’s and their public commitment to the issue. Despite purporting notions of “immigration justice” and the desire to “abolish ICE” on her website, AOC’s very active Twitter account only features immigration-related content 6% of the time in recent periods. Similarly, Lee’s website espouses that she is “one of the most outspoken proponents of comprehensive immigration reform in the Congress.” However, only 15% of recent content on Lee’s Twitter feed discusses immigration, 6.4% of issue discussion on her government website, and immigration is not even part of her campaign website’s listed issues. This disconnect betwixt the members’ action in Congress and their articulation of local immigrant interests is a concern that we address with three previously mentioned ideas.

Consequently, we recommend that NY14 increase social welfare to aid immigrant incorporation in the district. This expansion in welfare could include expanding municipal ID cards by making it easier for immigrants to prove their identity, and include local voting benefits through the ID program such as exists in New Haven. Further, AOC should work to expand subway subsidy programs, because public transit is imperative for living, working, and going to school, especially in NYC. That said, it could be argued that NYC is already implementing extensive programs aimed to aid immigrants and minorities, so expansion may not be a top priority.

Our second recommendation is for Sheila Jackson Lee to push for Houston to become a sanctuary city. Research shows that economies are stronger and crime is significantly lower in sanctuary cities as compared to those in non-sanctuary cities. Another study of immigrant communities showed that increased involvement of police in immigration enforcement has significantly heightened the fears many Latinos have of the police, contributing to their social isolation and exacerbating their mistrust of law enforcement authorities. Thus, sanctuary city status for Houston would extend greater protections to its immigrant community – particularly the undocumented segment – and increase the overall safety of the community by allowing Latinos and immigrants to have a safer relationship with law enforcement. A counter-argument to making Houston a sanctuary city is that the policies required are expensive which presents a burden to legal taxpayers and local governments; it is estimated to have cost taxpayers around $113 billion to fund American sanctuary cities in 2013 (with the majority borne by those local to the respective locales).

Finally, we recommend for both Sheila Jackson Lee and AOC to increase their vocalization on immigrant issues – particularly in the local context in hopes to increase the saliency of local immigrant interests, incite change, and aid immigrant integration. A counter-argument to this proposition is that the demographics of both districts have been very stable over the last 10 years, which suggests a stable public opinion on immigration, thereby, not warranting either of the Congresswomen to devote more resources to the issue.

Despite the aforementioned counter-arguments, we believe that our representatives could better represent on immigration by centering the needs of their immigrant communities. Expanding access to welfare, being more vocal about immigrant needs, and adopting sanctuary city policies would foster a safer, fairer, and more welcoming environment for their constituents.

NY-14 Media Content Analysis

May 13, 2019 / Samantha Goerger / 0 Comments

Intro Slide

NY-14 is currently represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On the right, she is pictured protesting the Trump administration immigration policies and child detention in Texas.

Slide #1

Congressional District NY-14 has a high, non-native, non-white population. 21.6% of residents are naturalized foreign-born citizens, while 25.4% are non-U.S. citizens. By racial demographics, the district is comprised of 47.7% Latinx, 18% Asian, and 11.1% Black constituents. Academic literature suggests that, because of the high proportions of minority groups, NY-14 will have resources available to improve lives of immigrants. Specifically, Abrajano & Singh (2009) found that, when available, Spanish television news sources are statistically significantly more positive when speaking about immigration topics than their English counterparts. Because of NY-14’s high minority population, the current study hypothesizes the following: H1) that the local Spanish daily newspaper will be more positive towards immigration than the local English daily newspaper; H2) that the Spanish coverage will focus more on humanitarian aid than the English source. These hypotheses are grounded in the research by Abrajano & Singh as more positive coverage may imply more focus on humanitarian aid rather than partisanship issues and border security.

Slide #2

One hundred articles were collected from each of the two local news sites — El Diario (Spanish) and the Daily News (English) — from the period of December 11,2018 – January 31,2019, coinciding with the government shutdown. An article was collected if it contained any of the following words: immigration, immigrant, border, wall, shutdown, security, or undocumented (English); or inmigrante, muro fronterizo, inmigración, muro en la frontera, indocumentado, indocumentada, al cierre del gobierno, or seguridad (Spanish). Perfect translations for the Spanish terms often did not exist and needed to be constructed by a phrase or were necessarily extended to multiple genders if an adjective. In order to specify key terms and date ranges, articles were scraped by a Python script through Google News. The scrape was limited to 100 articles in each language due to a lack of computational power. To complete the analysis, word sentiments were obtained through the NRC Word-Emotion Association lexicon, which provides positive-negative ratings and emotional connotations of words in over 100 languages based in the original English lexicon. In order to determine article focus in categories of Partisanship, Security, and Humanitarian Aid, two words (pictured on the bottom right) were chosen for each category that acted as signals for article content. As with the search terms, “Republican” was necessarily extended to “Republicano” and “Republicana” to account for gendered adjectives in Spanish.

Slide #3

Two-sample t-tests were run on the English and Spanish article content to determine if one source used more positive or negative language in speaking about immigration. Both sentiments were tested because positivity and negativity are not necessarily mutually exclusive since many words in the lexicon are not associated with either sentiment and some words may carry both connotations. Results did not show a significant difference between sentiment values, so the null hypothesis that the language sources are not different in sentiment cannot be rejected and H1 is inconclusive. Graphs are pictured on the right, which show the top words used in each language for each sentiment. Although it is not a statistical test and general conclusions cannot be drawn, the results are interesting to interpret. For example, both language sources heavily used “government” and “president,” but English positive words center around money and resources, while the Spanish words are about agreement and personal security (“Seguro”, “casa”, “construir”). Visualizing the top used words also helps identify the limitations of this analysis and the NRC lexicon in particular. “President,” for example, while generally a positive term, could easily be seen as negative or neutral in the situation of the shutdown, depending on the political beliefs of the human interpreter. Likewise, “cierre” in Spanish is classified as positive; however, it means “closure,” which is not positive in the context of immigration. It is also interesting, and perhaps problematic in this context, that “white” is heavily used in the English source and that it is classified as positive. Future research should address these limitations by compiling an emotion lexicon specific to immigration through mass polling to avoid researcher bias.

Slide #4

Articles were classified into each focus by examining which category had the most terms per article. For example, if an article had 30 Security terms, and only 10 each of Partisanship and Humanitarian Aid, it was classified as a Security article. Two-sample t-tests were also run to determine focus of each language. Although the three categories are mutually exclusive, all three tests were run to determine which focuses were preferred, if any, in each language. There was no significant difference in Partisanship classification between sources; however, a significant difference was shown for both Security and Humanitarian Aid. El Diario articles were shown to be classified as Security at a statistically significantly higher rate than The Daily News articles. Dissimilarly, El Diario articles were classified as Humanitarian Aid focus at a significantly lower rate than The Daily News. These results hold even after applying a Bonferroni correction (m = 5, for each sentiment and focus test; p < 0.01). That said, as pictured on the right, the English articles contained more focus terms for each category in general, with the average English article containing 8.48 Partisanship terms as compared to Spanish articles at 1.4 terms per article. These results are similar across focus categories as seen in the graph. This difference may be due, in part, to imperfect translation of the terms. Although they were directly translated using crowd-sourced translation service (Linguee) and researcher language experience (Advanced Proficient), a direct translation may not have been appropriate in this instance, because the language may use other terms to signal the focus categories. Future research should consult native Spanish speakers and Spanish news writers to adequately translate focus terms.

NY-14 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

April 15, 2019 / Samantha Goerger / 0 Comments

Introduction Slide

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) represents congressional district NY-14, which covers the upper Bronx and northwestern Queens. On the left is a picture of AOC and the right panel shows a sketch of Astoria, Queens overlooking Manhattan.

Slide #1

NY-14 has a diverse, yet fairly consistent population. This Hispanic population comprises the plurality of the district’s racial make-up at over 47%. NY-14 also has high proportions of foreign-born naturalized citizens (21.6%) and non-U.S.-citizens (25.4%), though the majority are native-born. Percentage point (pp) changes are illustrated on the top of each bar, beginning in 2012. Because NY-14 was redistricted in 2012, population changes are difficult to measure for a 10-year period. A 7.1 pp increase is seen in the Latinx population between 2007 and 2012 as well as a 7.2 pp decrease in the black population. Similarly, a 6.49 pp decrease is seen in native born constituents with a 5.36 pp rise in non-U.S. citizens between 2007 and 2012. However, these changes may be due to redistricting. No large population changes are seen between 2012 and 2017, so this may be evidence that the district’s population has remained fairly consistent with strong minority and immigrant representation.

Slide #2

Academic literature points towards general ingroup acceptance but outgroup rejection of immigrant populations. Specifically, Els de Graauw showed that an increase in immigrants led to the creation of nonprofit advocacy groups focused on immigrant societal and political integration (2008). In the same paper, and supported by Andersen (2008), nonprofit organizations of this type were shown to improve immigrant experiences by access to resources. That said, media coverage of immigration typically adopts a negative tone, especially in news sources located close to the U.S.-Mexico border (Farris & Mohamed, 2018; Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015; Branton, 2009). Abrajano & Singh also analyzed the difference in tone between English and Spanish news sources and found that the Spanish sources were typically more positive about immigration, and that Spanish news consumers tended to favor immigration more than English-only consumers (2009). Finally, various studies have illustrated an association between increased immigration and local anti-immigrant views (Hopkins, 2010; Enos, 2014). In particular, white constituents are likely to be less supportive of immigration and to vote for conservative causes, especially in areas with high Latinx populations (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015; Dunaway et al., 2010).

Slide #3

Given the aforementioned literature, the following predictions were made about NY-14. Because of the high proportion of immigrants and minority constituents, NY-14 is expected to have many nonprofits working on immigrant issues, which would in turn lead to increased access to social and political resources as well as a large local immigrant advocacy network. NY-14 is situated far from the border, so it is expected to have less immigration news coverage in general. Additionally, because of the high Latinx population, NY-14 is expected to have access to Spanish news sources that are more positive than local English sources, as found in Abrajano & Singh (2009). The district’s population has remained relatively consistent, with minority members comprising a large majority of the population and a high proportion of immigrants. Because of this, NY-14 is expected to be generally accepting of the immigrant population. An increase in immigrants and Hispanic residents was seen between 2007 and 2012, so a prediction could be made that there will be more local anti-immigrant views relative to 2007. However, because of the redistricting, this prediction is inaccurate at best. Additionally, negative views are predicted to be concentrated among the few white conservatives in the area, though, as seen in previous projects, the Republican party does not have a strong constituent base in NY-14.

Slide #4

Due to data availability and the demographic make-up of NY-14, I chose to develop a research plan dedicated to testing the local news sources, hypothesizing that the Spanish coverage will be more positive towards immigration relative to the English news. In order to test this, I will examine news from the New York Daily News (English) and El Diario (Spanish) from between December 22, 2018 – January 26, 2019. The dates correspond to the January U.S. government shutdown over funding to build a wall on the Mexican border, with the addition of one day at the end to catch any coverage immediately after the passage of the budget. To analyze the sentiments, I will first use Python web-scraping to form a database of news articles from both sources. Then, sentiments will be analyzed using the NRC Word-Emotion Association dictionary, which gives negative/positive ratings as well as feelings such as “disgust” and “anger” associated with each word. Unfortunately, no Spanish equivalent exists; however, NRC provides a dictionary for 105 different languages related to the English dictionary through Google Translate. There are obvious inaccuracies involved with the use of Google Translate, but the NRC dictionary has been tested profusely in both languages with high accuracy for determining word sentiment. Finally, the sentiment rates between the Daily News and El Diario will be compared to see which reported more positively/negatively about immigration.

NY14 – Samantha Goerger

March 7, 2019 / Samantha Goerger / 0 Comments

Introduction Slide

New York 14 is situated in the upper Bronx and northwestern Queens of New York City. It is currently represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Slide #1

NY14 has had consistent Democratic representation for at least two decades. Joseph Crowley represented the area from 1999-2018, with a redistricting in 2012 from NY7. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) unseated the incumbent Democrat in the 2018 New York primary election and proceeded to win the house seat with 78.2% of the vote. She ran as a Democratic-Socialist with progressive policies aimed at mobilizing the minority constituents. As depicted in the left-hand graph, it was not uncommon for Democrats to win over 70% of the vote in NY14, situating it as an unquestionably Democratic district.

Slide #2

Academic literature surrounding immigration politics focuses primarily on variables pertaining to area demographics and to local political representation. Specifically, Wong (2017) theorized that a larger foreign born population would shift the median voter to the left. Wong (2014) also found that increased LatinX representation is negatively correlated with support for strict enforcement policies. Additionally, districts with large minority populations are less likely to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement (Wong, 2012), and larger numbers of recent arrivals are positively correlated with pro-immigrant policies (Ramakrishnan & Wong, 2010). That said, the most salient variable in most immigration literature is political party representation. Specifically, Republican representatives, both locally and nationally, are more likely to favor restrictive immigration policies (Wong, 2017; Casellas & Leal, 2013; Ramakrishnan & Wong, 2010).

Slide #3

NY14 is highly diverse with native born constituents comprising only 53% of the population. 57% of constituents self-identify as non-white, with 48% identifying as Hispanic or LatinX of any race. As seen in the introduction slide, the average adult education level trails the national average, with few having obtained a Bachelor’s degree or higher. According to the US Census Bureau, 11% of the population falls under the poverty line. Given the aforementioned literature on local demographics, the median voter in NY14 is expected to be more liberal than the general public. The district representatives are, therefore, expected to favor less restrictive policies and not support strict internal enforcement.

Slide #4

Because AOC has only been in office for three months, it is difficult to analyze her policy preferences directly through voting records. In fact, vote tracking websites do not list any votes pertaining to immigration except to overturn the recent national emergency declaration. Because of this increased difficulty, I relied on AOC’s campaign website and Twitter feed. When discussing the issue on social media, she is vehemently against ICE and immigration enforcement, often invoking intense language such as “hostage” to describe President Trump’s intention to build a wall and detain families. That said, immigration is not a central focus of her campaign. Immigration is listed as the seventh key issue of fifteen on her website. Additionally, only 5.66% of recent Tweets and 2.95% of election month Tweets reference immigration. Conducting a basic analysis of words used in her Twitter feed, I found that most prominent issues mentioned were taxation and climate change. Therefore, while AOC is passionate about pro-immigration policies as predicted by the aforementioned literature, it falls short of the most important issue in her platform.

Democrats Used To Talk About ‘Criminal Immigrants,’ So What Changed The Party?

February 27, 2019 / Samantha Goerger / 0 Comments

Read the article here.

Summary

The readings this week discussed the polarization of immigration politics and how this interacts with local policy making. Previous scholars argue the relevance of variables such as wage competition between blacks and whites, overcrowded housing, and high proportions of linguistically isolated households (Ramakrishnan and Wong, 2010). However, Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010, and Wong 2012 found that the most salient variable in explaining increased restrictionist policies was the share of Republicans in each locality. That said, while much of the focus of partisan immigration politics has been on the “radicalization” of the right, this article instead discusses the changes in the Democratic party that have exacerbated party polarization.

The article presents the following theories for the rapid change of opinion within the Democratic party:

1) Shifted focus to Civil Rights

In the early 2000s, the NAACP began to relate the immigration issue to Civil Rights rather than as a threat to black workers. Concurrently, the AFL-CIO membership became increasingly diverse, and they reversed their position on immigration, mirroring the rhetoric presented in Pew’s study.

2) Increased familiarity

The Democratic party itself has diversified, with non-white membership increasing eighteen percentage points since 1995. One pundit explained, “Americans over the last decade have become more profoundly and deeply pro-immigrant because they know immigrants.”

Question

Given that the divergence of opinions occurred around 2006, what are some other potential variables that may have led to the Democratic party altering its viewpoint? How does local politics interact with the increased familiarity aspect, as we read for this week?