Immigration and political socialization (completed)

Alex Street, Michael Jones-Correa (University of Pennsylvania), Chris Zepeda-Millán (Loyola Marymount University)

International migration provides new opportunities to study how people learn the skills and habits of democratic citizenship. Migrants and their parents can experience very different political circumstances, making it easier to identify the effects of the political context on political learning. This project focused on a stark contrast that arises due to US immigration and citizenship laws. Millions of people born in the USA are growing up as citizens, even though their parents are denied most civil and political rights as ‘illegal’ immigrants. With funding from the Russell Sage Foundation and Cornell University, we conducted an opinion survey of one thousand US-born Latinos with immigrant parents in August 2013 to gather information on socialization processes and political behaviour.