Rights, Economics, or Family?: Frame Resonance, Political Ideology, and the Immigrant Rights Movement

Although social movement scholars in the United States have long ignored activism over immigration, this movement raises important theoretical and empirical questions, especially given many immigrants’ lack of citizenship. Is the rights “master” frame, used extensively by other US social movements, persuasive in making claims for noncitizens? If not, which other movement frames resonate with the public? We leverage survey experiments—largely the domain of political scientists and public opinion researchers—to examine how much human/citizenship rights, economics, and family framing contests shape Californians’ views about legalization and immigrants’ access to public benefits. We pay particular attention to how potentially distinct “publics,” or subgroups, react, finding significant differences in frame resonance between groups distinguished by political ideology. However, alternative framings resonate with—at best—one political subgroup and, dauntingly, frames that resonate with one group sometimes alienate others. While activists and political theorists may hope that human rights appeals can expand American notions of membership, such a frame does not help the movement build support for legalization. Instead, the most expansive change in legalization attitudes occurs when framed as about family unity, but this holds only among self-reported conservatives. These findings underscore the challenges confronting the immigrant movement and the need to reevaluate the assumption that historically progressive rights language is effective for immigrant claims-making.