Re-running this from eight years ago as it still seems relevant:
In a post entitled “Not that complicated,” sociologist David Weakliem writes:
A few days ago, an article in the New York Times by Amanda Taub said that working-class support for Donald Trump reflected a “crisis of white identity.” Today, Ross Douthat said that it reflected the “thinning out of families.” The basic idea in both was that “working class” (ie less educated people’s) opposition to immigration is a symptom of anxiety about something else.
In September 1957, the days of the baby boom and the “affluent society,” when unions were strong and no one was talking about a crisis of white identity or masculinity, the Gallup Poll asked “UNDER THE PRESENT IMMIGRATION LAWS, THE HUNGARIAN REFUGEES WHO CAME TO THIS COUNTRY AFTER THE REVOLTS LAST YEAR HAVE NO PERMANENT RESIDENCE AND CAN BE DEPORTED AT ANY TIME. DO YOU THINK THE LAW SHOULD OR SHOULD NOT BE CHANGED SO THAT THESE REFUGEES CAN STAY HERE PERMANENTLY?”
42% said yes, and 43% said no.In July 1958, another Gallup Poll asked “IN EUROPE THERE ARE STILL ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY THOUSAND REFUGEES WHO LEFT HUNGARY TO ESCAPE THE COMMUNISTS. IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT THE U.S. PERMIT SIXTY-FIVE THOUSAND OF THESE PEOPLE TO COME TO THIS COUNTRY. WOULD YOU APPROVE OR DISAPPROVE OF THIS PLAN?”
33% approved and 55% disapproved.With both questions, education made a difference for opinions. For example, in 1958, 55% of the people with a college degree favored letting the refugees come to the United States, compared to 31% of those without college degrees. The only other demographic factor that made a clear difference was that Jews were more likely to favor letting the refugees stay.
The 1957 survey also had a question about the Brown vs. Board of Education decision against school segregation—people who approved were more likely to favor letting the refugees stay. The 1958 survey had a series of questions about whether you would vote for various religious or racial minorities for president—people who were more tolerant were more likely to favor letting the refugees come to the United States.
The Hungarian refugees were white, Christian, and could be seen as part of a clear story of oppression vs. resistance. Despite this, most people, especially less educated people, were not in favor of letting them stay in the United States. So the contemporary opposition to immigration, and the tendency for it to be stronger among less educated people, are not a reflection of something specific to today, but continue a long-standing pattern. Of course, an increase in the number of immigrants today presumably makes the issue more important. But the basic pattern is not new.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
Interesting: among those who expressed an opinion, over 60% opposed letting those 65,000 anti-communist Hungarian refugees come to the U.S. And, as Weakliem points out, it’s hard to explain this based on ethnic prejudice, which is how we usually think about earlier anti-immigrant movements such as the Know Nothings of the 1850s.
Just one thing, though: There was a big recession in 1958. So people could’ve been reacting to that. In retrospect the 1958 recession doesn’t seem like much, but at the time people didn’t know if we were going to jump into another great depression.
Maybe Americans are just xenophobic.
it’s hard to explain this based on ethnic prejudice,..
Identifying causality is hard!
I think isn’t just an either/or and I don’t I think that ethnic prejudice is eliminated as one factor because Hungarians are mostly white and Christian. Famously, so were Italian immigrants, although they were largely considered non-white. How many people being surveyed had much of an idea about the ethnicity of the Hungarian refugees?
As “gcfgbfd” suggests, teasing out the distinction between xenophobia and ethnic prejudice seems like a tall order.
Joshua,
As someone who graduated from high school in 1959, I can tell you that national origin was still a much bigger deal in the 50s than it is now, although terms like hunky or polack were going out of style by then, so it was not as bad as before. Nevertheless, I expect that people knew the ethnicity of Hungarians. I don’t remember anti-Hungarian attitudes, but I grew up in a liberal area, where people by and large approved of Brown v Board of Education. We had a couple of Hungarian kids in our school, whose family left after WWII, and one of them got elected student body president. But, I also remember many adults worrying about the next depression.
Identifying causality is very easy. Is event A in the past lightcone of event B? If yes, then it caused event B collectively with every other event in that lightcone.
Quantifying causality may be difficult. But it is impossible to do with methods designed to merely identify causality.
lol
Identifying causality is very easy.
Identifying moderators and mediators and interaction effects, and collecting longitudinal data all seem quite complicated to me. And while not a requirement per se, I think it’s pretty important to work out a plausible causal mechanism. And I often see identification of causality without those criteria being fulfilled. So yes, it’s “easy” in sense, as in the poorly done sense. As in “Qutting smoking is easy. I’ve done it dozens of times.”
Btw – you might like this guy (seems a leading proponent of calorie restriction as a cancer treatment and the view that cancer is a metabolic disorder and not genetic).
https://open.spotify.com/episode/13ZLZ9l44EVOOH3jFYCxjU?si=9Jk4GlKITDeKJTsaO6ulVQ
David –
I think that a big factor was (and still is) that many people think of jobs and resources as a fixed supply, so immigrants would be taking them from native born Americans.
Sure. But I think it’s real able to argue that view isn’t necessarily separable from ethnicity-based prejudice.
That’s part of the reason why this is such s contentious issue. Where and how can we tease out ethnicity-based prejudice and views that immigrants take jobs or lower wages, and views that immigrants stimulate growth, sustain economies, and add cultural depth?
People want their issues to be simple. Conditional probability is hard!
Ugh. Reasonable to argue…
My family was in favor of letting Hungarians in. We were Jews with personal memories of people trying to escape evil European regimes by entering the USA. I was eleven years old and glad to see kids who played soccer arrive. Not that it would change any minds, but I am curious about the educational, financial, and social standing of the descendants of that influx.
Some of those Hungarians did okay. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove and
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/03/10/andy-grove-refugee-tech-pioneer-and-immigrant-entrepreneur/
See also https://time.com/4267448/andrew-grove-man-of-the-year/.
No doubt, his descendants have reasonable educational and financial standing.
Bob76
Most Hungarians were Catholics, and anti-Catholic attitudes had long been and were still common among US Protestants in the 1950s. (John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was an issue in his 1960 campaign for the Presidency. Well-known Protestant clergy expressed the fear that if elected he would be “taking his orders from the Pope.”)
In the early 1980s, when I began living and teaching in the South (Research Triangle area in NC), anti-Catholic sentiment was still relatively freely expressed (and Klan rallies still occurred – the Ku Klux Klan was of course virulently anti-Catholic).
A very large majority of Irish and Italian immigrants were Catholic, and similarly for immigrants from South America.
So I wonder if anti-Catholic attitudes explain at least some of the anti-immigrant attitudes among those in the US.
So the issue is “taking his orders from the Pope ”
e.g., anticatholocism, like many prejudices in US history, is partly driven by a fear of disloyalty to the US.
But – not in response to you particularly but in more general terms: it should be far below the competence of people with an advanced education to claim that millions of poeple all have a single motivation for the aggregate answers to one question on one survey. IMO the idea that this can be so is appropriate for first graders, not PhDs. It’s to bad we have so many pathetic morons teaching in universities flogging such flat out stupidity.
Anon:
There are a million or so people teaching at universities in the United States. It stands to reason that some of them will be pathetic morons—that’s just how it goes! I can’t imagine any occupational category with millions of people that doesn’t have a few such people.
But, just to be clear, the commenter above did not “claim that millions of people all have a single motivation for the aggregate answers to one question on one survey.” He explicitly wrote that he was wondering if a particular set of attitudes “explain at least some” of what was observed in that survey.
Although I’m sure there was some prejudice, overall it was a pretty sympathetic case, but there was still a good deal of opposition to letting them in, or even letting them stay permanently if they were already here. See also my post of August 3, 2019: in 1964, even people whose grandparents were all born outside the United States were more likely to say that immigration should be reduced than that it should be increased (and this was when the restrictive 1924 law was still in effect). As far as why, I think that a big factor was (and still is) that many people think of jobs and resources as a fixed supply, so immigrants would be taking them from native born Americans.
You are making a partisan political point that I respectively disagree with. George Borjas is uniformly respected for his personal and research integrity and scholarship. I suggest you invite him to make a guest post on social science model and the state of academia.
Joey:
Huh? The above post is all facts; it has no political points. What in the post do you disagree with?
First is the argument that support for Trump and opposition to mass immigration result from “a crisis of white identity.” and that opposition to mass immigration “is a symptom of anxiety about something else”. I have worked since 2018 as a low wage retail worker and have witnessed how mass low skill immigration (legal and otherwise) results in downward pressure on wages (I defer to experts like Borjas and Angus Deaton here).
Second is the whole false tired tendentious narrative that ‘we are a country of immigrants’ and ‘here is another proof point about how we tried to close the door in the past and we should keep it open now’.
Students are taught that we are a nation of immigrants. They are never told that: (1) In the past immigrants came here legally. (2) The economy needed low skilled low education workers, so in a way we prioritized immigration based on skill and what is best for the nation (3) Immigrants assimilated and integrated into American society, history and traditions. (4) There was not a huge welfare state. (5) There were pauses in immigration giving time to assimilate.
Joey:
“First is the argument that support for Trump and opposition to mass immigration result from “a crisis of white identity.””
The above post was not arguing that, it was quoting a NYT article that was arguing it. In fact Weaklim seems to be arguing *against* it (at least, against the idea that it is the biggest reason). Both Weaklim and Andrew are arguing in the comments that anti-immigration are economically motivated – just as you are.
“Second is the whole false tired tendentious narrative that ‘we are a country of immigrants’ and ‘here is another proof point about how we tried to close the door in the past and we should keep it open now’.”
Neither of these things were argued in the article. I’m genuinely flummoxed where you even got this from. The only thing Weaklim seems to be saying is that data shows that immigration has been a very divisive issue in America a long time before now. Andrew added the extra context that there was a recession in the late 1950’s. You seem to have substituted the above blog post for one you invented in your head.
Can you explain why people are so angry at a group of Haitian immigrants, invited here legally for the specific purpose of filling labor gaps, and who have been performing that function well?
“Can you explain why people are so angry at a group of Haitian immigrants, invited here legally for the specific purpose of filling labor gaps, and who have been performing that function well?”
My first guess is that those two points – invited here legally to fill labor gaps and performing their function well – are not widely known and/or understood. Most likely a very different narrative has been going around social media, podcasts, etc.
Vance clarified this (somewhat) during the campaign. His view is that the Haitian immigrants were not really legal – he said their status was unconstitutional. I’ll take his word for it – that he did not view their status as legitimate, but I’ll note that apparently nobody sought to clarify this in court. Just another of the cases where the legal system is viewed as an impediment rather than an essential part of our government. I believe that many Americans did not understand whatever legal issue was being (not) debated. I was frustrated that the press did not push Vance on his statements. It’s one thing to claim that you believe their special status granted by the current administration was invalid – but it is quite another thing to demand further details and question why it was not being contested.
There seems to be a presumption that opposition to immigration must be based on an ethnic prejudice. My guess is that most of those people would deny that they think that there is anything wrong with the Hungarian people. Hungarians are different from Americans, and it may be as simple as that.
Roger:
I don’t see the presumption that you’re saying. Indeed, in my post above and in Weakliem’s comment, we suggested economic reasons as one explanation, given that there was a recession in 1958. I guess that just about everyone thinks that ethnic prejudice is part of the story—indeed, ethnic prejudice could explain some pro-immigration attitudes also.
Also, regarding your claim, “Hungarians are different from Americans” . . . I guess it depends on which Americans you’re talking about. John von Neumann was an American, and he wasn’t so different from a Hungarian!
You must be joking. Von Neumann was also different from every (other) American. He was different from everyone on Earth. I am not even sure that he was human.
While I think stuff like this is interesting and worthwhile, I don’t think it’s really fair to say that “X has occurred before, before anyone ever talked about Y”, the implication being that, therefore, “Y” cannot be the reason “X” is occurring now (I know I’m oversimplifying Weaklim’s position here). The world is a very different place now than it was in the fifties. I do actually agree with Weaklim that a lot of anti-immigration sentiments comes down to economics… I just don’t think this is a satisfactory argument for why it can’t be something else.
For the sake of the discussion, I would like to mention that a lot of pro-immigration sentiments is *also* based on economic reasoning, as immigrants can prop up societies with falling birth rates. Like a lot of things, it seems like a good portion of this issue can be covered by “it’s the economy, stupid”.
Thanks for the response, and I apologize if I misread it. I need to be more careful, and don’t immediately jump the gun when the information source is a sociologist.
David –
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/11/17/anti-immigration-attitudes-they-didnt-want-a-bunch-of-hungarian-refugees-coming-in-the-1950s/#comment-2383963
Belongs here.
While I am sure that racial prejudice plays a role, I doubt that it’s the major role in why people don’t want immigrants. I think we see that because we’re always told that everything in society is about race. In South Africa, we’ve had a lot of problems with xenophobia, resulting in many riots (even killings) and political movements. It seems to be motivated by economic issues and it’s always been described as xenophobia. If the same thing happened in the US, with exactly the same motivations, it would be called racism because the immigrants are black. But in South Africa, the people opposing those black immigrants are also black.
There are probably many overlapping reasons that explain people’s preferences and prejudices but I feel society has a tendency to find one that they like and then stop searching for more. We’d probably benefit from looking back in the past, as with the Hungarians in the US example, or among different countries, like xenophobia in South Africa, and identifying what is common rather than just finding something that fits our preconceived notions and assuming it explains everything.