Taking the Heat: How Salient New Immigrant Groups Redirect Xenophobic Public Opinion
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Under what conditions can xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants diminish? By analyzing internet search data, a panel survey of group-specific attitudes, and conducting an original survey experiment, Dr. Rasband demonstrates that Chileans’ perceptions of Peruvian migrants improved significantly as Venezuelan migration became more prominent between 2016 and 2019. These results suggest that prejudice toward certain migrants can decrease rapidly when the host population shifts its reference group as new immigrants arrive.
Speaker: Reed Rasband, Lecturer in Government, Harvard University
Moderated by Alisha Holland, Professor of Government, Harvard University
About the Speaker
Reed Rasband is a Lecturer and the Pedagogy Fellow at Harvard's Department of Government, studying comparative politics. He studies identity politics, public opinion and intergroup relations with an emphasis on migration. His dissertation research focused on reactions to Venezuelan migration in Chile and Brazil. Within Latin America, he has visited seven countries and conducted fieldwork in Colombia and Brazil, in addition to two years spent living in Chile. At Harvard he has taught courses in political science pedagogy, and he is currently teaching a seminar on the politics of immigration.
About the Moderator
Alisha C. Holland studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America(Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the politics of law enforcement against the poor. She is working on a new book on the institutional determinants and challenges of infrastructure investment in Latin America. Prior to joining the faculty, she was an assistant professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.