2 - Civic Fairness and Group-Centrism

Summary

In this chapter, we develop a framework for understanding how Americans’ opinions about immigration policy issues emerge from their conceptions of civic fairness. We then review leading theories of immigration attitudes that are premised on group-centrism, with an eye to considering (1) what questions they leave open about the relative influence of considerations rooted in political values and group allegiances and animosities, (2) what challenges they pose to the civic fairness framework, and (3) where they lay claim to empirical phenomena that could also be explained by conceptions of civic fairness. Finally, from this discussion we derive several hypotheses that guide the empirical tests in the chapters that follow. These hypotheses apply to situations where values collide with group loyalties to race and nation, which is to say instances in which the civic fairness and group-centrist perspectives make distinct predictions about what immigration policy alternatives Americans will choose.