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Migration Status and Political Knowledge Among Latino Immigrants

This paper invokes a membership-exclusion theoretical model of immigrant integration to investigate political incorporation. Specifically, we examine the extent to which unauthorized migration status is associated with general and particular political knowledge and with other kinds of structural incorporation. In the analyses, we use data from the initial wave of the 2012 Latino Immigrant National Election Study (LINES) targeting adult immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find that unauthorized Latino immigrants have significantly lower levels of general political knowledge than green card holders, those with other government IDs, or naturalized citizens, and that the difference between the unauthorized and the legal groups holds up when controls are introduced for exposure (quantity and quality of time in the country) and various kinds of structural incorporation, although differences among the legal groups do not. Thus, forms of structural integration mediate the effects of exposure on acquisition of general political knowledge by legal immigrants, but they do not for unauthorized immigrants, providing evidence that membership exclusion severely restricts political incorporation. At the same time, unauthorized immigrants show more awareness about changes in the unemployment rate than legal immigrants do, a result consistent both with their main reason for migration (to work) and with their having recourse only to collective action as a form of political expression.