Foreign Language Exposure, Cultural Threat, and Opposition to Immigration
Foreign Language Exposure, Cultural Threat, and Opposition
to Immigrationpops
Benjamin J. Newma
Todd K. Hartman
Charles S. Taber
The identification of threat to culture as a distinct category of concern over immigration has its intellectual roots in the study of nativism. The belief that specific immigrant groups will fail to assimilate due to their ethnicity, religion, or culture of origin, and thus Americans’ fears that their culture will be contaminated or displaced, is a defining feature of American nativism (Bennett, 1988; Higham, 1985; Schrag, 2010). Measures of symbolic threat and concern over the cultural impacts of immigration serve as consistent predictors of antipathy toward immigrants (Sniderman et al., 2004) and support for restrictive immigration policies (Citrin et al., 1990; Citrin et al., 1997; Hood & Morris, 1997). 637
In their “Fitting-In Experiment,” for instance, Sniderman and colleagues (2004) manipulate whether a new immigrant group speaks Dutch fluently, as well as the degree to which this group will likely assimilate into Dutch culture. The authors report that subjects in the “immigrants do not speak Dutch and are not likely to fit it” condition are more likely to oppose new immigration than those in a control condition. While this finding is generally interpreted as demonstrating the effects of symbolic, group-level threats on national identity, the results from this experiment could just as easily be viewed as evidence that Dutch citizens had personal, pragmatic concerns about coming into contact with linguistically unfamiliar immigrants. From this perspective, native-born citizens may well be worried about something very realistic—that is, the ability to effectively communicate and comfortably interact with outgroup members in their local communities. 637
A second, related limitation of political science research on the concept of cultural threat is the failure to consider threats that operate at the individual or personal level. Instead, the focus of existing research has been almost entirely at the group level—that is, interactions between Hispanic immigrants and Americans as a whole. 637
immigration entails intercultural contact, where members of distinct cultural groups engage with one another on a consistent basis. Over time, these individuals incorporate culturally distinct elements from each other into their own culture through a process of exchange known as acculturation (Redfield, Linton, & Herskovits, 1936). Acculturation is characterized by the displacement of the original cultural patterns of a group, followed by a period of cultural adjustment and change. 638
In addition to complaints over the experience of language barriers, one participant in the focus-group study confessed that being around immigrants who speak another language appears arrogant and rude, and another stated it made her feel excluded and unimportant, 639
First, we hypothesize that frequent contact with non- English speakers should enhance the perception among White citizens’ that immigration poses a cultural threat. And second, we hypothesize that by enhancing the perceived cultural threat of immigration, contact with linguistically unassimilated immigrants should indirectly augment support for restrictive immigration policies. 640
From the standpoint of our language-centered theory of cultural threat, the mechanism linking contact with non-English-speaking immigrants to threat perceptions and policy attitudes is presumed to be foreign language exposure and feelings of threat in response to experienced barriers to interpersonal interaction 645
Benjamin J. Newman, Todd K. Hartman, Charles S. Taber. “Foreign Language Exposure, Cultural Threat, and Opposition to Immigration.” Political Psychology, vol. 33, No. 5, 2012, pp. 635 – 657. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00904.x
