Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States

Out of Line: Immigration and Party Identification among Latinos and Asian Americans

Much of the burgeoning literature on contemporary immigrant political incorporation is motivated by careful theory and analysis on how today’s political parties compare with those of yesteryear (e.g., see Jones-Correa 1998a; Rogers 2000b; Wong 2000a; Gerstle and Mollenkopf 2001; Ramírez 2002; Lien, Conway, and Wong 2004; Ramírez and Wong, this volume). For the most part, the scholars behind these works conclude that today’s parties lack the organizational capacity , the cultural literacy, and perhaps even the political motivation to shepherd new immigrants into the political process and nurture secure attachments with a particular political party. Even before the current spate of works on immigrant political incorporation, other scholars of urban politics have noted that not all immigrant groups from Europe were equally incorporated (see, e.g., Ignatiev 1995, Jacobson 1998), that the willingness of party machines to incorporate new immigrants varied across historical contexts (Mayhew 1986) and with the degree of party competition in a city (Erie 1988), and that nonparty organizations like neighborhood associations, unions, churches, and ethnic voluntary associations were equally vital in incorporating new immigrant groups (Sterne 2001). Yet, this relative absence of evidence for a strong role for parties in mobilizing new immigrants has not dampened the interest or enthusiasm of politicians, pundits, party activists, and political scientists alike in passing conjecture and reaching conclusions about how Asian Americans and Latinos will come to see themselves in partisan terms. Will Asians and Latinos ally with the Democratic Party on the basis of collective racial interests as African Americans have since the civil rights era (Dawson 1994, Tate 1993)? Or will their party identification be channeled more by economic interests, foreign policy preferences , home-country politics, and liberal and conservative ideological Out of Line Immigration and Party Identification among Latinos and Asian Americans Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee 130 Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee beliefs? Will Asians and Latinos help to reconfigure and reconstitute existing political coalitions? Will they seek to leverage their numbers as swing voters? Or will they simply vote as individuals on an electionby -election, candidate-by-candidate basis? The variety of opinions on these questions is almost as many as the number of opinion makers. One of the more colorful such examples comes from Peter Brimelow in Alien Nation, who concludes that “the post-1965 immigrants are overwhelmingly visible minorities. And these are precisely the groups that the Republican Party has had the most difficulty recruiting. . . . The numbers are indisputable: Current immigration policy is inexorably reinforcing Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition” (196). Interestingly, Brimelow further argues that Latinos contribute prominently to this “scalawag” coalition (together with African Americans, Jews, and “minority whites”), but with respect to Asians, “[t]he truth is this; no one has the faintest idea how the Asians will vote” (197). In this essay we examine the contemporary relationship between immigration-based groups and the American two-party system by taking the important prior step of properly conceptualizing party identi- fication—whether individuals come to identify with a particular political party and, if so, which party they identify with and why they do so. We first review the conventional “linear” political science model of party identification and enumerate several reasons why the linear approach is not likely to tell us much about partisanship acquisition among Latinos and Asian Americans. These arguments are then tested using the two principal political surveys of Asians and Latinos—the 1989–90 Latino National Political Survey and the 2000–2001 Pilot National Asian American Politics Study. As a statistical test, these multivariate analyses are principally concerned with demonstrating the limits of existing models of party identification to immigrationbased populations like the Asian American and Latino communities— a yardstick that the corresponding empirical results easily exceed. The essay concludes with some elements of a fuller account of how such new immigrant groups are likely to develop their partisan attachments and the questions that then arise from their party affiliation. The Linear Model of Party Identification While substantial controversy exists over the likely partisan attachments of Asians and Latinos, there is little dispute over how to conceptualize party identification. To date, one view dominates our under- Out of Line 131 0 2 1 3 4 5 6 Democrat Independent Republican Strong Moderate Weak Strong Moderate Weak Figure 1 Continuum of party identifications standing of party identification. The prevailing view...