00;00;00;08 - 00;00;15;05
Chris Judge
Hello and welcome to the Providence College podcast. This week we're presenting an episode of Beyond Your Newsfeed Understanding Contemporary Politics, a podcast from the PC Political Science Department. Here is retired professor and host of Beyond Your Newsfeed, Bill Hudson.

00;00;15;23 - 00;01;01;00
William Hudson
Welcome to Beyond Your Newsfeed Understanding Contemporary Politics, a podcast of the Providence College Political Science Department. My name is William Hudson, professor emeritus of political science. And host of this podcast. America has often prided itself as a nation of immigrants. Apart from indigenous peoples, Americans generally are descended from someone who came to this country from somewhere else. Despite this history in recent years, many Americans have shown growing hostile toward immigrants politicians like former President Donald Trump and fueled and capitalize on this hostility in their anti-immigrant rhetoric.

00;01;02;08 - 00;01;36;21
William Hudson
Immigrants who are engaged to engage in political action of some type or hold elective office are particular targets of hostile reactions. My guests today are the principal investigators in a major national study, the immigrant Visibility and Political Activism Research Collaborative, a joint initiative of Providence College and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. This project is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

00;01;37;01 - 00;02;06;23
William Hudson
This study seeks to understand xenophobic reactions to immigrants, in particular reactions toward those immigrants who engage in political action. With me are the principal investigators who are going to provide us a early look at their found findings from this project. So I am pleased to welcome to be on your news feed, Professor Jeff Pugh of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Professor Matt Guardino of Providence College.

00;02;07;23 - 00;02;44;04
William Hudson
Regular listeners are familiar with Professor Guardino, who is a frequent guest on Your News Feed. Most recently on a very interesting episode about the demise of local news. I'm very pleased that Professor Jeff Pugh is joining us for the first time. Jeff is an old friend and colleague who spent several years on the political science faculty here at Providence College until he was lured away to the UMass Boston to join the faculty of the McCormick Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, where he is an associate professor of conflict resolution.

00;02;45;09 - 00;02;51;29
William Hudson
So Jeff, welcome to be on your news feed. And Matt, once again, welcome back.

00;02;53;11 - 00;02;56;27
Jeffrey Pugh
Thanks, Bill. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation and having us on.

00;02;57;11 - 00;03;29;04
William Hudson
And we're recording on Zoom this time and both our guests look very fit and eager to talk about their very exciting study. So why don't we begin and have you sort of give us some background on this study, the visibility and political activism research Collaborative, which I note in all your documents you referred to as Ivy Park. So the acronym.

00;03;29;20 - 00;03;44;02
William Hudson
But anyway, tell us about the study. What what are its major goals? How did it come together? And how did your collaboration as the two provincial principal investigators occur?

00;03;44;22 - 00;03;51;01
Jeffrey Pugh
Matt, why don't you give a bird's eye overview of the project and then I'll talk about the backstory.

00;03;51;11 - 00;04;47;21
Matthew Guardino
Okay. Sounds good. So this is a project that is just as our as our acronym suggests, really about attitudes, Americans, attitudes toward immigrants, but especially toward the political activity and political invisibility or invisibility of immigrants in the United States. And so as Jeff, we'll get into it a little bit ultimately comes out originally of a of a framework that Jeff created and built on in some publications, including his recent book and what we're really doing here is taking some interesting theories and ideas and findings that Jeff generated from work in Latin America on immigrants and attitudes toward immigrants in Latin America and kind of transporting them a bit to the US context and looking at

00;04;48;02 - 00;05;07;18
Matthew Guardino
U.S. attitudes toward immigrants, and particularly the extent to which immigrants political activity is tolerated and valued in this context. And so, you know, there are a lot of moving parts to it, but that's sort of the basic sort of topic and foundation for it.

00;05;08;10 - 00;05;29;04
William Hudson
Yeah. So this really draws on this research you've been doing for many years now, just in Latin America. Perhaps you could tell us something about that background. And and then I'd like to hear more about how that sort of led to you connecting up with Matt and coming conceiving this study.

00;05;29;18 - 00;05;59;04
Jeffrey Pugh
Absolutely. So a theme that'll probably come up a few times throughout the conversation today is the speed of research. And I tend to be one of those folks that thinks that big good ideas take some time to percolate a little bit. And or maybe that's self-justification. It took me about 15 years to from the start of my project to when I published the book.

00;05;59;13 - 00;06;23;01
Jeffrey Pugh
And, you know, I was doing fieldwork in Ecuador and Colombian migrants especially. And the way that the Ecuadorian host population facilitated or rejected their integration and their political participation. And I most of my work tends to be on the Global South. I'm in international relations and comparative politics.

00;06;23;01 - 00;06;38;21
William Hudson
Person And Jeff, in that study that study was in northern Ecuador, right on the border of Colombia. Right. And Colombian immigrants were coming across, right. Escaping the violence and things in Colombia.

00;06;38;21 - 00;07;27;06
Jeffrey Pugh
For most of the past two decades. Colombia was the biggest producer of forced migrants because of its 60 year long civil war. And Ecuador was the largest recipient of refugees and and asylum seekers in the Americas. And so it was a quite a laboratory for studying this and in a case most people don't think about. And one of the things that sort of excited me about studying this, this migrant integration connected with political participation phenomena in the Global South is I could really get at the end formal dynamics that happen because I think in the Global North there's this assumption that a law then produces an outcome and I think it doesn't always work that

00;07;27;06 - 00;07;58;11
Jeffrey Pugh
way. But in the Global South, more people are familiar with. There's a big gap between what the law says is going to happen and what happens in practice. And those nitty gritty gaps are where I was really drawing. But as interesting as I found that, you know, there's a large segment of the political science discipline that is not so interested in things happening outside of the U.S. and one subfield that tends to think that the United States is exceptional, right?

00;07;58;11 - 00;08;40;22
Jeffrey Pugh
That the kinds of politics that happen here are completely unrelated to the kinds that happen elsewhere. And so I thought, wow, this is an opportunity. I found this sort of pattern of the way that people integrate or reject migrants, the importance of contact for peacebuilding and things like that. And I think it applies here too, that the informal dynamics that happen could be applied to the U.S. and I actually did construct a survey experiment and carried it out with with the entire sample.

00;08;40;22 - 00;09;13;22
Jeffrey Pugh
So very much a convenient sample of US participants. But as I started to try to do something with that, I began hitting up on the limitations of my own. Right. I, I, I love big picture ideas. I'm a mixed methods person, so I use survey data in my book. I use network analysis, interviews, ethnography, etc. But there's a limit to how sophisticated the quant methods are that I'm able to do just because of training.

00;09;14;04 - 00;10;04;13
Jeffrey Pugh
And so as I started translating this into the US context, I said, this has potential. This could be a really interesting contribution to conversations in the US about immigration. It's a timely topic and I think that it could benefit from a collaboration and I was well familiar from having been colleagues with Matt and actually part of the hiring process of bringing Matt to Providence College of his well-established track record, not only as an American politics specialist, a method ologist, but also theoretically he had complementary skill sets to mine much more depth in political psychology and political communication, whereas I probably bring more experience on immigration as a topic itself.

00;10;04;21 - 00;10;30;04
Jeffrey Pugh
And so that was exciting. And in 2017. So if we're counting five years ago now, I reached out to Matt with this idea and in in true fashion, Matt was cautious at first but interested and said, you know, I'm intrigued, but just so you know, I'm busy the rest of this semester. So we got to sort of set expectations about the timeline.

00;10;30;09 - 00;10;54;25
Jeffrey Pugh
Of course, five years later, that seems quaint to be worried about what the the schedule was that semester. But we met at APS, at the American Political Science Association and really sort of hammered out what could be the basis of this collaboration. And we've been working on it got a grant this past year to really put a lot of energy behind it.

00;10;54;25 - 00;11;37;23
Jeffrey Pugh
And that's been exciting. I'll just I want to get Matt to chime in here as well on his side of the the track record. But I want to really emphasize that this has been a true collaborative effort. And this past year, the full if park team has been essential to scaling up the effort and its success. So we have a research collaborative that includes the two of us as primary investigators, but also three research assistants, Kelsey Edmond and Chris Langevin are doctoral students at UMass Boston, and Julia McCoy, a political science graduate from Providence College.

00;11;38;04 - 00;11;45;14
Jeffrey Pugh
And they have just brought energy and wonderful ideas and good and good contributions to the project too.

00;11;45;27 - 00;12;08;19
William Hudson
So that's great. So with this collaborative, my understanding is that one of the things your grant has allowed you to do is to do a very extensive survey to write data for your analysis. Jeff, I want I want us to get to your theory of the invisibility bargain, the sort of the theoretical framework for this in a minute.

00;12;09;02 - 00;12;22;26
William Hudson
But we'll kind of go at that through the back door. And I wonder if Matt could say a little something about the survey you've done, which is sort of the heart that has produced the data that you're going to be analyzing in the next few years.

00;12;23;03 - 00;12;50;11
Matthew Guardino
Sure. So to to kind of piggyback off what Jeff was saying earlier about our can have the origins of our collaboration, when Jeff approached me about this, I mean, I was familiar with Jeff's work and and impressed with it, of course, for many years. But I had had virtually no knowledge of Latin American politics and very little knowledge of immigration politics in the U.S. So I was coming at it sort of with fresh eyes.

00;12;50;11 - 00;13;12;09
Matthew Guardino
But when I looked at the data, he had mentioned the midterm sort of pilot study that he asked me to take a look at and to kind of do some work on analyzing. I was really intrigued by the idea and I thought that, you know, this could be something that could be the basis of a bigger project with higher quality data, with a much larger sample.

00;13;12;20 - 00;13;45;28
Matthew Guardino
And it would be an interesting way to apply a lot of AI theories and concepts in public opinion, political psychology, which is what I do, and to apply it in this kind of quantitatively rigorous way and kind of kind of have that synergy. And we, as Jeff mentioned, we were able to do that. And it was fascinating because, again, it allowed me to learn about immigration, which is extremely to put it mildly, politically important in the U.S. as elsewhere, and to really kind of dig into this with some excellent data.

00;13;45;28 - 00;14;20;23
Matthew Guardino
And so with the help of our grant from Russell Sage and the Carnegie Corporation, we were able to hire the survey firm YouGov, which is a very highly respected firm, to help us field a survey which we fielded in September 20, 2021. So last year, that is really excellent. First of all, it's a demographically representative sample of U.S. adults, which is increasingly difficult to obtain in given the kind of technological and social conditions that we live in.

00;14;20;23 - 00;14;47;16
Matthew Guardino
And so we were fortunate to get this wanted to be able to hire one of the best firms around to help us do this. And so we were able to get a sample of 1800, which is a very, very large sample for this type of study, U.S. adults. And it's not a probability study in the technical sense, but because of yougov's excellent matching methods, they're able to create or generate a demographically representative sample.

00;14;47;16 - 00;15;13;11
Matthew Guardino
So we're very, very, very confident that the findings that we have reflect the broad U.S. population. And this is also very recent data, right? So just about eight months after the end of the Trump presidency, September 2021. And so we're able to really get a good look at immigration attitudes and immigration politics in that, you know, recent and really salient political context.

00;15;13;21 - 00;15;46;17
Matthew Guardino
The other piece of this of the survey that's important is we embedded an experiment in it, which we can talk more about later. We're able to not just ask respondents questions about their views and behaviors regarding immigration and beliefs, but also to show them different photographs of immigrant rights and other protest marches and to gauge their reactions to them using experimental methods, which is an important piece of what you know that we're able to bring to the project.

00;15;47;05 - 00;16;07;04
William Hudson
Okay, super. Well, let's start to dig a little bit into the substance of of your work. And and to begin, Jeff, why don't you tell us a little bit about your your theory or conceptual framework, whatever you want to call it, of the invisible invisibility bargain which you derive from your work in Ecuador. So what's that about? Yeah.

00;16;07;04 - 00;16;47;07
Jeffrey Pugh
So this the insights that inform this framework have been distilling for a long time. They were present in my dissertation at Johns Hopkins and then refined in the book, and they're not completely new. They're not something that usually would surprise immigration scholars. They derive on on quite a long trajectory of of several sort of theories about why a host population might be more or less receptive to immigrants coming in.

00;16;47;07 - 00;17;18;20
Jeffrey Pugh
And then in this case, also more or less receptive to allowing political participation. But the hope is that by tying them together in a cohesive framework, it allows us to really understand some of what happens. So the idea is that in most host countries that receive immigrants, it's not the case that everybody in the country just says all immigrants should go out, you know, should leave.

00;17;18;20 - 00;17;58;20
Jeffrey Pugh
There are a lot of people who want immigrants to be in the country, and there are even more people who are willing to allow it to happen, sort of an implicit tolerance of immigrant presence. But there's a set of unwritten but strongly enforced expectations about the rules that immigrants have to follow in order to stay. Right. So after looking in the U.S. and South Africa, in Ecuador and elsewhere, time and time again, I saw the importance of economic contribution.

00;17;58;20 - 00;18;26;06
Jeffrey Pugh
Right? There's a rich theory of economic threat and things like that. The idea that immigrants should should be contributing something of value to the host country. Otherwise they're seen as a burden or an economic threat. And more people will want them to to be deported or to not come in in the first place. But beyond the value contribution.

00;18;26;11 - 00;18;46;29
Jeffrey Pugh
And I changed it. I used to call it economic contribution, and now I refer more to valued contribution because it could be other things like military service for example. We found actually to be quite important, immigrants, even undocumented immigrants who have served in the military, are sort of seen as having made a valued contribution to the host country.

00;18;47;24 - 00;19;24;01
Jeffrey Pugh
So that's important. And also that the immigrants be seen to maintain social and political invisibility. And so what that means is they can maintain a presence. People won't actively persecute or try to kick them out as long as they're contributing with their labor or something else of a value to the host country and their differences in terms of race, culture or other markers of difference aren't being publicly expressed.

00;19;24;01 - 00;19;48;15
Jeffrey Pugh
So much that they are putting their differences in your face. Right. So the hijab ban in in France is an example of this, where public officials in in France are not supposed to wear a hijab or a headscarf indicating Muslim faith, because that's seen as a marker of difference that sets them outside of the norms and values of secular French society.

00;19;49;09 - 00;20;09;13
William Hudson
And you're saying that even a country like the United States, just a woman wearing hijab, can kind of violates your invisibility bargain in that she's making herself noticeable as an immigrant who has perhaps a different religious faith than the dominant faith in the community where she lives.

00;20;09;24 - 00;20;36;25
Jeffrey Pugh
Right. So that's an example of the social invisibility, bargain expectation being being violated. Now, which markers are salient is going to vary by country and we'll get more into that in a minute. But certainly that and also language, right? Anyone who's been in a Wal-Mart and heard someone accost a couple of people speaking in Spanish or Korean and say, hey, you're in America, speak American.

00;20;37;02 - 00;21;06;09
Jeffrey Pugh
Exactly. Is that social sanction for a perceived violation of this social invisibility expectation? And then the political invisibility expectation is the idea that immigrants are not becoming involved in overtly demanding things from the host government. And this sort of follows from a logic of kind of an ownership paradigm. This is our country. You're a guest here, and if you're going to come in, you should just be grateful.

00;21;06;09 - 00;21;36;26
Jeffrey Pugh
It's what Caroline Mullin calls a logic of gratitude with immigration, that it's not that immigrants have inherent rights, that they're here because of our generosity to let them. And so if they start demanding things in demanding their rights, that shows that they're not appreciating that generosity, that they are exercising a political standing that actually is more precarious than that.

00;21;36;26 - 00;22;23;26
Jeffrey Pugh
And so all put together, if if an immigrant group is perceived to be making a valued contribution, is is sort of restraining its public expression of cultural differences and is not making overt political demands, they're more likely to be accepted and allowed to stay. Now, what that does, the dark side of that is it leads to a precarious status right there being told will extract your labor, but want you to deny your full humanity, your full personhood, because that would show that you're claiming a sort of central role in the political society that we don't want to give you.

00;22;24;10 - 00;22;28;19
Jeffrey Pugh
And so presence without sort of rights.

00;22;28;29 - 00;22;55;23
William Hudson
And what you say, Jeff, then an immigrant who violates that bargain, that invisibility bargain, who in fact doesn't conform to these expectations, is sort of creating a target on themselves, right? They're a target of hostility. I thought it interesting in one of your papers, you begin by talking about Representative John Omar, who is a perfect example of someone who violates all of these things you talked about.

00;22;56;13 - 00;23;24;20
William Hudson
Well, maybe not the first such till he's made economic contributions, but certainly she you know, she wears the hijab. She is active in politics and not shy about expressing her political opinions. And she has been sort of people like Donald Trump sort of pick her out and an attacker because she's, you know, not acting the way immigrants are supposed to to act that you.

00;23;24;20 - 00;23;25;13
William Hudson
And to add to that.

00;23;26;00 - 00;23;47;22
Matthew Guardino
Yeah, just one thing I wanted to add to again, sort of on the big picture level with this and it speaks to my interest in this project specifically, which is that as Jeff said, you know, one of the implications is the sort of precariousness of immigrants who are seen to violate these expectations and the ways in which their lives and communities lives can be negatively affected.

00;23;47;29 - 00;24;18;01
Matthew Guardino
Obviously, extremely important. Another additional way to look at this is from the perspective, especially with the political visibility and visibility, the perspective of the house of democracy and the host country and the vitality of it. And so I'm interested in a lot of my work in political voice and in the conditions that, you know, kind of maximize and diversify political voices, say, through the media and those that constricted.

00;24;18;03 - 00;24;40;29
Matthew Guardino
Right. And so I saw an interesting way to think about this with the invisibility bargain, because, you know, to the extent that these attitudes are strong and widespread and like, say, in a country like the United States, then the overall democratic political system and political culture is impoverished in an interesting way that I had not previously really thought about.

00;24;40;29 - 00;24;50;04
Matthew Guardino
Right. And so that's it's important to realize that the negative implications of this are multidimensional.

00;24;50;12 - 00;25;19;09
William Hudson
And it occurs to me, Matt, that the implications might even be broader than just immigrants. That is, there are other people in society who also are subject to some of the same factors. This kind of invisibility pardon, perhaps for a lot of particularly minority groups in society other than immigrants, I think African-Americans for, you know, 202, three years have had to wrestle with, you know, expectations about what their behavior is.

00;25;19;09 - 00;25;47;03
William Hudson
And if and if they conform to the expectations or if they don't conform to expectations, then their ability to participate is greatly constricted. So I think that's you know, these are I think you're right. This occurs to me this has really very broad implications for understanding a lot of our policies. So so let's work with that with that in mind, because we have this this concept of this multi bargain immigrants are supposed to conform to certain behaviors.

00;25;47;03 - 00;26;08;09
William Hudson
Otherwise there's sort of this hostility towards them. So you did a survey maybe to start out with. Could you tell us a little something about your sort of the descriptive findings? So what did you learn about how how Americans think about immigrants is sort of a very general way from your service.

00;26;08;09 - 00;26;29;13
Matthew Guardino
So I can start with that and just begin a kind of a basic, but I think really important level, which is just, you know, using these, you know, looking at these high quality data like how widespread attitudes are reflective of the invisible ability bargain are within the U.S. So just like you know how many Americans seem to subscribe to these expectations.

00;26;29;13 - 00;27;08;16
Matthew Guardino
And what we found basically is a lot of Americans subscribe to these expectations, both in terms of social invisibility and political invisibility. Just so, for example, you think about social invisibility from 30 to 35% of Americans favor either banning outright or severely restricting the entry of immigrants who have minority, racial, religious or linguistic identities. So they're willing to say in a survey, I would like few or no immigrants from, say, a minority racial background or a religious background to enter the United States.

00;27;08;16 - 00;27;45;05
Matthew Guardino
That's about a third of Americans. So that's a pretty, pretty wide spread. Similarly with the political invisibility expectations, similar number are around 30 to 33% of Americans are willing to say that they favor prohibiting immigrants in general. And this is an important point. So not undocumented immigrants, but immigrants in general from, say, contacting government officials, from contacting the media, even from participating in nonviolent protest.

00;27;45;05 - 00;28;01;05
Matthew Guardino
So we specifically say nonviolent protest in the survey and from even from signing political petitions. Right. So, again, around a third of Americans willing to outright say that immigrants in general should not be legally allowed to do those things.

00;28;01;29 - 00;28;20;05
William Hudson
All right. That's so it seems like there's a a third of Americans who in particular have this propensity to expect the invisibility, bargain and objective. It's not if it's not met anything else. So from your survey that.

00;28;20;12 - 00;28;45;19
Jeffrey Pugh
It's also important to recognize certainly the scope that this is not a marginal phenomenon. Right. This is pretty ingrained throughout society, but there is variation also. And that was really part of the motivation of this project building on on the previous research with the book is okay. So we think that this is a pattern that describes a lot of people's behaviors.

00;28;45;28 - 00;29;17;00
Jeffrey Pugh
But obviously some people are more susceptible to it than others, which once it might apply to certain kinds of immigrants more than other kinds, which ones and what's what as an individual level, what kinds of factors going on in someone's head would make them more likely to lash out or inflict social sanctions on immigrants that they perceive to be violating this bargain.

00;29;17;00 - 00;29;43;07
Jeffrey Pugh
And so that's where we had factors that we were looking at about, for example, political intolerance. You know, people saying immigrants should not have the right to protest nonviolently. And we asked about lots of different kinds of immigrants from undocumented immigrants, in which case more than half of the respondents thought they should not have the right to protest nonviolently.

00;29;44;18 - 00;30;28;15
Jeffrey Pugh
Those who are undocumented. But as I said earlier, were perceived to be giving the ultimate sacrifices. Military veterans. Only a third of people thought that they should not have the right to engage nonviolently in protest. That's still a significant number, but very different than sort of an unqualified undocumented population. And then for within the legal category, those with a permanent visa, 23% of the U.S. population, according to this survey, thought that they should not have the right to engage in nonviolent protest, even naturalized citizens.

00;30;28;15 - 00;30;54;00
Jeffrey Pugh
So people who have all of the same rights as everyone else, they just weren't born here. 13% thought they shouldn't have the right to engage in nonviolent protest. And so when people say, oh, well, you know, it just matters. Undocumented is its own thing. I like the good ones. I like the documented ones. Our findings show that it's not that neat and tidy of a story, right?

00;30;54;02 - 00;31;17;23
Jeffrey Pugh
Even for people with documentation, there's people who reject those claims and even for people without documentation, there's a lot of difference in people's comfort level in political activity based on what kind of undocumented immigrant, what kind of contribution they're perceived to be making. So that's, I think, is an important distinction that we're able to to look at.

00;31;18;03 - 00;31;22;10
William Hudson
Now, a new survey also finds differences based on country of origin.

00;31;22;13 - 00;31;55;00
Jeffrey Pugh
Well, that's right. So we we have one where Matt was alluding to the the desire to reject immigrants from countries most of whom have the same race as the dominant group in the U.S., from a different race, those from poorer countries, from different religion and different language. And so in that finding, language really stands out as a marker of difference in the US context that drives a lot of the intensity.

00;31;55;00 - 00;32;21;26
Jeffrey Pugh
So people are more likely to say immigrants from countries with a different language should not be allowed to, few or none should be allowed into the U.S. More than a third of respondents said that race actually is is a little less of a factor. It's still a factor, but compared to language and religion. But in this case, especially language, it it's it's less important.

00;32;21;26 - 00;32;49;13
Jeffrey Pugh
And we also looked at region and country of origin with a social distance scale. So we were asking people in in in what social contexts would you accept an immigrant from each of these regions? And we asked about about Africa, Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Europe. And then it went from who would you be comfortable letting into the country all the way to?

00;32;49;20 - 00;33;21;19
Jeffrey Pugh
Who would you be comfortable with? You're close relative, Mary. So it's sort of at what level of proximity are you comfortable with these people coming, not just coming into the country or not? And those from Europe, more people were comfortable with more proximity, but even even them, those from Europe, I think like five, 5%, 6% said they would not be comfortable with them marrying a relative.

00;33;22;02 - 00;33;50;24
Jeffrey Pugh
But in contrast, those from Asia and Latin America were about about double the likelihood of of rejecting them close levels of proximity. And those from the Middle East were triple compared to compared to Europe. And so country of origin. And by that, people derive racial and religious proxies. I think that's another way of looking at that and finding that those markers do really make a difference.

00;33;51;09 - 00;34;24;13
William Hudson
Right. And certainly I, I know I, I, I was very intrigued by your social distance. Scale as I was preparing this and looking at it. And it's clear that the, the recent international politics of the last couple of decades, you know, two wars in the Middle East, the war on terror, which is very focused on the Middle East, seems to have had a big impact on people's willingness to accept people from Middle East because of the hostility towards people.

00;34;24;13 - 00;34;45;09
William Hudson
The Middle East is is even so much greater than than towards people from Latin America or Africa. And I think that is a direct reflection. You know, the war on terror. I'm I'm sorry, speculating but my guess is that had you done something like this in the 1960s, you probably wouldn't find that big of a difference.

00;34;46;16 - 00;35;15;01
Jeffrey Pugh
I think that's an important point, is these aren't sort of fixed magic recipes that are going to apply in all places and over all time periods. It's a sort of socially constructed relationship between immigrants in their host countries, and it changes over time. I think 911 was a big shift. The US where religion became more important than it had been before as a marker of difference in a perception of threat.

00;35;15;01 - 00;36;03;07
Jeffrey Pugh
I think before people coming from Latin America were probably more the sort of target of this sort of rejection and anti-immigrant activism. And then afterwards Islamophobia became especially ingrained in media discourse in other places. And so religion, I think, took an important role. And then, you know, which groups are constructed as threatening. I was recently reading Reese Jones wonderful book, White Borders, and he traces the history in the US back to the Chinese Exclusion Act and shows how ingrained the desire to exclude people from Asia was in the late 1800s and early 1900s and you know, more than the other groups.

00;36;03;11 - 00;36;12;01
Jeffrey Pugh
And so I think the the specific markers change over time, but we can get a sense of the patterns that we can use to examine them.

00;36;12;09 - 00;36;13;24
William Hudson
Yeah, exactly. Matt.

00;36;14;08 - 00;36;39;23
Matthew Guardino
The other thing I would add here is just again a bit from a kind of wonky survey methodology perspective, but I think an important substantive point, which is that like this probably these findings probably understate in many ways the prevalence and scope of invisibility work attitudes and the intensity. And I say that we're asking very, in many cases, really explicit questions.

00;36;39;23 - 00;37;16;24
Matthew Guardino
We're asking people to, you know, honestly and forthrightly say that they would say not accept immigrants from a minority language or race nation. Right. Or, you know, thinking about the specific regions. And so and there's this concept called social desirability bias and public opinion research, which basically says that, you know, there's a tendency for, most of us, to downplay the reporting of attitudes, even on anonymous surveys that, like socially reflect on us poorly or that we feel that they do.

00;37;17;05 - 00;37;25;26
Matthew Guardino
And so probably this is really just scratching the surface of the extent to which many of these attitudes are actually held by the American public.

00;37;26;06 - 00;37;56;18
William Hudson
And in your survey, you're not only of try to describe sort of the range of of attitudes that Americans have in regards to immigration and the extent to which they conform to the expectations of the invisibility. Oregon But you also at factors that either trigger or mitigate this hostility. Could you talk a little bit about those factors, what those are and what would you found in your survey?

00;37;56;27 - 00;38;27;25
Matthew Guardino
So I can start with that. So in terms of the factors that we you know, in terms of our key hypotheses that we tested and we, we believed might intensify these attitudes, we looked at three, so we looked at ideology, so extent of the extent to which respondents identify as conservative. We looked at authoritarianism, which is a psychological characteristic that reflects a desire for sort of strict social order and kind of in-group conformity.

00;38;28;05 - 00;38;59;06
Matthew Guardino
And the third one we looked at is something called social dominance orientation, which is another psychological trait in which people are high in social dominance orientation tend to value a kind of strong notion of social hierarchy, as certain groups belong naturally on top, other groups below them. And I believe and justification of group based inequality so that social dominance orientation.

00;39;00;12 - 00;39;34;03
Matthew Guardino
And then the key factor that we looked at is potentially mitigating the invisibility bargh attitudes is the extent to which people had contact with immigrants and how often they had contact with immigrants, and also how positive or of what quality their contacts with immigrants were. So those were the key factors. And basically we found that conservatism makes one more likely to expect social and political invisibility, as does authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.

00;39;34;15 - 00;39;42;16
Matthew Guardino
But social dominance orientation seems to have the most powerful effect. So that's sort of the the kind of take home there.

00;39;42;29 - 00;40;05;09
William Hudson
That could could we probe that a little bit to sort of listeners understand what the social dominance means because of the three factors this is the one that that I had to think more about to really understand what you're getting at. So this is a a predisposition to expect people to be on some kind of a higher hierarchical level that some people are better than others.

00;40;05;20 - 00;40;32;17
William Hudson
But this strikes to me, this would be white supremacy would be a variant of this, right? A social dominance. Right. If you think all white people are better than people of of a darker shades, that's the kind of social dominance thing or or even something to be sort of a more mundane example of the college fraternity hierarchies. Right.

00;40;33;08 - 00;40;37;19
William Hudson
Do the same kind of thing might am I wrong about that just said so.

00;40;38;14 - 00;40;59;12
Jeffrey Pugh
Of course all of these factors are somewhat related to each other, right? A lot of them go in the similar directions, but part of the design is to be able to disentangle them, control some things, and figure out what each one is doing on its own. And social dominance orientation is, as Matt talked about, is the the one with the strongest effect.

00;40;59;28 - 00;41;45;07
Jeffrey Pugh
This comes from Jim Sylvania, his work. He's a political psych. He was a political psychologist at Harvard. And he sort of invented the concept and then did a lot of really pathbreaking work over a number of years. And I guess the hierarchy part is what I like. Matt I would point to most that not only a tolerance for, but I would say a celebration of inequality, that there is a natural elite that should be on top of, as you say, build a superior part and then those who definitely should be below and so in maybe one way to do it is to contrast it with authoritarianism, which, you know, is a related concept.

00;41;45;07 - 00;42;26;25
Jeffrey Pugh
But there the the the big focus is order following the rules and, and following a an order. Whereas maybe social dominance orientation doesn't care as much about order, it cares about this hierarchy. If you get the hierarchy by disrupting the order, so be it. And you know, there's been lately a lot of conversation on headlines and things about the great replacement this idea by some people that immigrants represent a threat because they are threatening to replace the position and power of the dominant group in the U.S..

00;42;27;02 - 00;42;44;01
Jeffrey Pugh
Well, what that means is their changing their location on this natural hierarchy in society according to these people. So that seems like it's written from the text, the sort of playbook of social dominance orientation now.

00;42;44;01 - 00;42;44;11
William Hudson
Good.

00;42;44;21 - 00;43;10;08
Matthew Guardino
So I'll just add to that just to kind of highlight in this, it's one of the reasons why we think our project is interesting is because there hasn't been frankly that much work in political science that uses and that applies this social dominance orientation concept. It really comes out of psychology and political psychology specifically, which highlights the important idea that this is a really deeply rooted predisposition.

00;43;10;16 - 00;43;37;10
Matthew Guardino
And it's it's not just support for and justification for a sense of hierarchy and inequality, but it's also a belief that that hierarchy in inequality, group based hierarchy and inequality is natural. It's part of the natural order. Right. And the questions that make up the of scale kind of get at that right in different ways. So it's hierarchy which has to do with who's on top and who's on the bottom in terms of power.

00;43;37;10 - 00;44;01;03
Matthew Guardino
But it's also inequality of resources. Some groups deserve greater command over resources, including economic resources, than others, and that, although it's related, authoritarianism conceptually as well as correlated moderately empirically, it is a distinct concept from authoritarianism as well as from the others that we use.

00;44;02;12 - 00;44;39;00
Jeffrey Pugh
And part of the reason to bring in these psychological concepts is to push back a little bit on the sort of easy, superficial answer that some people give in public rhetoric, that it's a left right story, that Partizanship just explains everything, that all Democrats are pro-immigrant and all Republicans are anti-immigration. And I think what our findings are is partizanship or at least ideology is what we've been more working with lately.

00;44;39;19 - 00;45;23;07
Jeffrey Pugh
Certainly has a has an effect. But this almost deeper psychological predisposition has more of an effect. And so you could be a conservative person who is low on sdoh and you could be quite open to immigrants and their positive role in the host society and not be particularly triggered by perceptions violations of the invisibility bargain. And so I think that's one of the the contributions we can make with this type of of research is disentangling those areas that people assume all go together, but in fact, may may be doing different work.

00;45;23;22 - 00;45;50;15
William Hudson
You know, it's very interesting. You also in in your work, you talk about certain contextual factors that trigger hostility. You want to talk a little bit about that. What are we what are the things going on in society that might trigger someone with a social dominance orientation to to suddenly focus on immigrants?

00;45;51;00 - 00;46;42;10
Jeffrey Pugh
Certainly the political moment matters, right? The kind of discourse media framing of the way immigrants are portrayed. And, you know, we already talked about how these things bury over time 911 being one sort of dividing line. I think the Trump presidency also is an important moment that changed the conversation around immigration. It legitimized certain messages, certain framing of immigrants that had not been legitimized beyond a real fringe before that and sort of gave permission to a lot of people to mainstream both rhetoric about immigrants that had previously not been accepted in polite society, and also policies, more extreme policies than had been contemplated before.

00;46;42;22 - 00;47;22;15
Jeffrey Pugh
And so the the role of a powerful national political figure and movement, really legitimizing a set of discourses also allows or sort of empowers larger segments of society to to enact more severe social sanctions, to the perceived invisibility bargain violations that they see. So in that sense, you know, political opportunities, rhetoric and media framing make a difference. I would just also point to on the other side, what mitigates the intensity of this pattern?

00;47;23;05 - 00;47;59;19
Jeffrey Pugh
People's relationships in the host society with immigrants makes a big difference. This draws again from psychology and the idea of contact theory that the more meaningful interaction you have with someone from another group, the less likely you are to be able to maintain prejudiced views towards that group. And it makes sense if you get most of your view of, of an other from sort of stereotypical portrayals on TV or the news, it's much easier to maintain these big categorical ideas about them.

00;47;59;19 - 00;48;24;08
Jeffrey Pugh
But when you have four or five good friends who are not all the same, and many of whom are hard working, contributing members of society who are from this other group, it's much harder to say, well, all people from that group are like this, right? So we did measure four for contact. How how frequently did people interact with immigrants?

00;48;24;27 - 00;48;57;14
Jeffrey Pugh
Was it positive or not? And in what kind of settings? And we're finding that that did at least make some difference, that those who had more especially valence, more positive interaction tended to not have as high expectations of the invisibility, political and social compared to those who had less interaction and maybe Matt can chime in a little bit also on some of the the variations within that pattern.

00;48;58;10 - 00;49;14;19
William Hudson
And that finding is consistent with so those general survey findings about how hostility towards immigrants is tends to be greater in those counties in America where there are fewer immigrants right. So, man, did you want to put some more detail on this?

00;49;15;02 - 00;49;46;06
Matthew Guardino
Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, just highlighting, first of all, that it's the the positivity and the quality of the contact that seems to matter the most. So in other words, not just it's really not how often one interacts with immigrants, but how in what context and especially how positive those interactions are. And so that has important implications potentially for thinking about, you know, what sorts of policies say in the future might encourage those sorts of positive contacts.

00;49;46;14 - 00;50;15;25
Matthew Guardino
The other thing I just want to piggyback on what Bill mentioned, the geographical element. One of our hopes for, you know, further down the line is we have a lot of other analysis to do first, but is to look at the kind of geographical elements of this of this situation and also just sort of residential contacts. So we have we're able to tell which state the respondents in our survey dataset live in, as well as whether they live in urban or rural areas.

00;50;16;09 - 00;50;29;05
Matthew Guardino
And so, you know, I think that that will be very interesting in thinking about regional politics and the rural urban divide in the US to kind of apply our framework to those to those dimensions.

00;50;29;05 - 00;50;48;10
William Hudson
Okay. I want to hone in on your experiment that was embedded in your survey, which which takes a look at reactions to political engagement by immigrants. So I want to describe how that sort of the setup here, how the experiment worked and what did you find from it.

00;50;48;10 - 00;51;03;22
Matthew Guardino
So I can start off with that, but I'll start with the caveat by saying that we haven't done as much analysis with the experiment as with some of the other data. And so some of the things I'm going to talk about a little bit more provisional and a little more simplistic, but just kind of set up what the experiment was.

00;51;04;07 - 00;51;31;17
Matthew Guardino
We basically randomly divided the 1800 respondents in our survey data set to each view a different photograph of a political protest, a street protest. And so we had equal numbers of of respondents in each experimental condition. And we had a baseline, what we call a baseline condition, which showed a photograph of a women's rights protest in the United States.

00;51;31;26 - 00;52;04;27
Matthew Guardino
And there was a short piece of text attached to each photograph which just described what the protest was. So in this case, it was a group of women and their supporters protesting for their rights. And then so that was one condition, which was our sort of baseline of women's rights protest. And then we had several conditions that were all immigrant rights protests that were virtually identical to the women's rights protest, with some sort of changes in the photograph to reflect variations.

00;52;04;27 - 00;52;31;04
Matthew Guardino
And so we had an overall immigrant rights protest in which protesters were shown and described as such. But all of the protest signs were in English. For example, we had another one that was the same, except some of the protest signs were in Spanish, but others were in English. We had another one in which some protest signs were in English, but some were in Arabic.

00;52;32;02 - 00;52;55;15
Matthew Guardino
We had another one that was the same as the original immigrant rights protest. But the only difference was that some of the women protesters in the photos, in the photo excuse me, were wearing good jobs. And then the last one was some women wearing hijabs and some signs in Arabic. So it varied both the language element and the religious element.

00;52;55;15 - 00;53;28;17
Matthew Guardino
So we had very different kinds of photos that so they all show political activity by immigrants, but they varied the social cues and that were reflected. Right. And so we and then we asked the respondents after viewing the photographs, a series of questions, should protesters have the right to engage in this protest? To what extent do respondents see the protest as violent?

00;53;28;17 - 00;53;52;01
Matthew Guardino
To what extent are they uncomfortable with the protest? To what extent do they think the protest violates American and then their overall reaction to the protests, asking them to, just as I describe it, choose words from a list by which to describe the protesters in the photo. So we had some negative words and some positive words, so we had a variety of different measures.

00;53;53;14 - 00;54;30;06
Matthew Guardino
We found that first and most importantly, we think overall reactions to the immigrant rights protests as compared to the women's protests, baseline condition were much more negative, right? So on all of the measures that I just described, people made a clear distinction between the women's rights protest and the immigrant rights protests. Right. And then we also found that respondents were way more likely to feel uncomfortable after viewing the immigrant rights protests than the women's rights protest.

00;54;31;01 - 00;55;07;12
Matthew Guardino
Way more likely to see the immigrant rights protests as violent. And those last two were especially the case for the protests that that made Islam or religion more salient through the hijabs. And so, you know, we see potential evidence there for that kind of Islamophobic dimension. And then finally, I mean, this might be the most interesting one. In some ways, people were way more likely to describe the immigrants rights protests in negative terms than the women's rights protests.

00;55;07;18 - 00;55;22;03
Matthew Guardino
And again, especially the protests that that that made religion salient. So that's sort of a snapshot, right, of what we found so far. We have a lot more additional analysis. We wanted to of those.

00;55;23;14 - 00;55;47;24
William Hudson
Of a lot of rich analysis here. And I'm sure you have plans for even more probing of of this data and see what you can find out about attitudes towards immigrants of anything you'd want to add about what you've discovered so far that our listeners ought to be aware of.

00;55;49;02 - 00;56;20;00
Jeffrey Pugh
I guess, some of the implications that come of it are complicating the easy stories that people tell on from our experiment. You know, I mentioned earlier that religion and language can play a really important role as markers of difference that make certain immigrants seem more threatening or more likely to be rejected others. But our experiment allows us to delve into that even a little bit more by showing multiple languages.

00;56;20;01 - 00;57;10;17
Jeffrey Pugh
Right. And it was clear that people didn't perceive Arabic the same way that they perceive Spanish. Arabic in general was seen as a sort of on the more, more negative side of the spectrum. And on religion, we didn't have another religious cue, but if people thought that many of of the Latin American immigrants coming in might be Catholic, which is different than the dominant Protestant group, that certainly did not come through as as a factor that seemed to make people reject them compared to the Islamophobia that Matt mentioned and which religions, which language groups are stigmatized is is sometimes a complex factor.

00;57;10;17 - 00;57;52;25
Jeffrey Pugh
But one that is widely shared and understood within society. So this isn't just an individual factor. It's something that society's kind of understand together. And I guess coming back to a point we alluded to before was ideology and I think that it gives some hope maybe that there's not, you know, half the country that is a lost cause for thinking about having more constructive attitudes about immigration, the power of the meaningful contact that we measured.

00;57;54;09 - 00;58;47;26
Jeffrey Pugh
Actually, folks across an ideological range were more affected and more likely to have their prejudice reduced, so to speak, by that meaningful contact compared to those with high sdoh sdoh is sort of a more ingrained psychological characteristic. So if you're thinking about, well, how do we do anything about this it might be more constructive to figure out how to find folks with that with the lower sdoh or, you know, approach folks across a range of ideology and you might have some success with that compared to going to a bunch of high sdoh folks where you may not get much change even from the contact.

00;58;47;26 - 00;58;56;22
Jeffrey Pugh
So those are the kinds of things that the more fine grained analyzes can actually have some helpful implications for us to understand.

00;58;57;07 - 00;59;09;16
William Hudson
Okay, super of. So what about the future for your project? Where do you see yourselves at this point? What do you envision for the future?

00;59;10;13 - 00;59;45;16
Jeffrey Pugh
I'll start and then I'd be interested to hear Matt chime in on this too. During the grant period, we have several, you know, key outputs that we are planning. The centerpiece is a scholarly article and we've already presented it at a couple of venues in the department at Providence College, at a workshop at the University of Pennsylvania and then we have it on the slate to present at the American Political Science Association and then hopefully submit it to a journal after that.

00;59;45;16 - 01;00;29;11
Jeffrey Pugh
And that'll be focused on more the descriptive statistical evidence that we talked about. There will be another scholarly article focused more on the experimental evidence, so that will have both pieces that are from this research agenda, but kind of can take each set of evidence seriously. And we also are pretty committed to the idea that this shouldn't just be navel gazing among academics, that we this is so timely and has concrete implications for politics now that we want to translate it into some forms that can contribute to political debates and a broad understanding among society.

01;00;29;20 - 01;01;00;04
Jeffrey Pugh
So we have already been sharing bits of it in social media. We have planned actually an explainer video about the concept because the concept, the invisibility bargain, I think has a lot of potential to help people think about the way immigration reception works in lots of contexts. And then we're working on some op eds as well that would be shorter pieces, more focused, but really target a wider audience and not just other academics.

01;01;01;14 - 01;01;17;05
Jeffrey Pugh
And, you know, as Matt alluded to earlier, there are additional paper. It's such a rich set of data that there's lots of papers that are within it that we could continue drawing on and hopefully invite other scholars into that conversation too, once we publish the data.

01;01;17;23 - 01;01;32;12
William Hudson
Now, and you alluded to policy changes that maybe this data, this information would would stimulate some thought about policies and approaches to take to to addressing immigration.

01;01;32;28 - 01;01;53;17
Jeffrey Pugh
Right. I'm currently on sabbatical and living here in Washington, D.C., so I'm hoping to be able to use that proximity to tap into some of the the policy networks that are here and help people to use the kind of knowledge that we're we're creating in in practical ways.

01;01;54;08 - 01;02;25;03
Matthew Guardino
The only thing I would add to that interest in terms of the broader of this is that we haven't talked too much about this today, but there are potentially large implications for the media and for news discourse. And so like, you know, there's a lot of other ring in the news and in media discourse. There's a lot of empirical research and political communication shows a lot of association of outgroups and immigrants, specifically with violence, with chaos, with disruption.

01;02;25;12 - 01;02;59;05
Matthew Guardino
And so, you know, I think that our findings, as we kind of spin them out more and elaborate them from the experiment, can potentially help, you know, by getting it more out into the broader public, maybe help news media to rethink the ways in which they cover immigration and and and also immigrant rights issues. Right. And, you know, it's a complicated subject about why the media do what they do, which is, you know, subject for another another day, another podcast.

01;02;59;05 - 01;03;07;22
Matthew Guardino
But I think our project has a bit to say about that and and maybe some newer things to say about it that haven't been said before.

01;03;08;26 - 01;03;46;26
William Hudson
Great. Well managed. Jeff, thanks so much. This is a fascinating project and I'm very glad that this collaboration developed. And and I like the idea that that that Jeff was talking about earlier that that to study immigration, United States, it's very useful to look at how immigration issues occur in other parts of the. And I think one of the great things about your project is that it grew out of Jeff's work in Ecuador and now you're focused on the United States.

01;03;46;26 - 01;04;18;16
William Hudson
And, you know, that's a really, really interesting facet of what you're doing. So best wishes to this project. I read one of your papers that you produced and it was fascinating and I look forward to the other scholarly work you produce. And and I'm very pleased to hear that you're interested in trying to get this the findings of this project into the more mainstream sort of popular media as well.

01;04;19;04 - 01;04;26;29
William Hudson
Okay. So so thanks very much for being on on your News Feed. I'm sure our listeners will find this a very interesting conversation.

01;04;27;09 - 01;04;32;13
Jeffrey Pugh
Thanks for having this Bill. It was wonderful to to be here and be able to share it. Yeah.

01;04;32;23 - 01;05;02;00
William Hudson
Yeah. Great, Justin. Great. Have you as someone who was under colleague for several years and a great to have you even back at Providence College via Zoom, which is a great thing. So and and Matt, always good to have you on the podcast. And anyway, we'll have you both back maybe in a several months from now to talk about more findings from your analysis of this very interesting data.

01;05;02;13 - 01;05;25;27
William Hudson
So thanks so much for for joining us on the podcast today. And thanks very much to Chris, judge of the Providence Office Marketing Communications, who's producing this episode. And thanks to our listeners for being supporters of the on Your News Feed. Please tell your friends about our podcast.

01;05;26;17 - 01;05;38;22
Chris Judge
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure to subscribe to be on your newsfeed and the Providence College podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to receive the new episodes when they are released. Thank you for listening and go Friars.