Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The issue of immigration policy has generated controversy in the US for most of the nation’s existence. In recent decades, the topic of illegal immigration has become an even greater source of conflict and controversy. While many studies have discussed the impact of self-interest, political ideology, political knowledge and other determinants of public attitudes, there is little research that specifies the roles of self-interest and political ideology when considering attitudes towards illegal immigration. In this study, we use structural equation models examine two distinct measures of objective and subjective self-interest, create measures of operational and symbolic ideology, and explore the main effects of these, along with political knowledge, on illegal immigration attitudes. In our previous study, we utilize the Chicago Area Study (CAS) data and find that objective and subjective self-interest show distinctive associations with attitudes towards illegal immigration, as do operational vs symbolic ideologies. These findings suggest that objective self-interest and operational political ideologies are more useful in understanding attitudes towards illegal immigration than are subjective self-interest and symbolic political ideologies. In this study, we use the GSS data (national data) rather than the CAS data (local data) to see whether we can have similar findings. This study extends current models and traces a theoretical and empirical path bridging the literature in political science and public opinion concerned with illegal immigration.