Collateral Damage
The Influence of Political Rhetoric on the Incorporation of Second-Generation Americans
Anti-immigration rhetoric negatively affects second generation Americans
Description
Collateral Damage provides an overview of how political communication influences the process of incorporation with the broad society as well as its political parties. Sean Richey shows that how politicians talk about immigrants affects how their children perceive America and their feelings about the nation. These perceptions and feelings in turn greatly influence the children’s desire to incorporate into American political society. He also shows that regardless of a speaker’s intended outcome, what is said can still have a deleterious effect on incorporation desire, a communicative process that he terms “collateral damage.” Richey uses new experimental and survey evidence, as well as the rhetoric of Donald Trump as a test case, to examine how anti-immigration communication influences the incorporation of the children of immigrants.
Sean Richey is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University.
Reviews
“Debates about immigrant incorporation have taken center stage in America in recent decades. But as this vital research shows, those debates themselves can influence immigrants’ children—anti-immigrant rhetoric weakens the second generation’s expressions of patriotism and attachments to the U.S. and the Republican Party. A cutting-edge study of a critical topic.”
- Daniel Hopkins
—Daniel Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania