Immigration has become the defining issue of a generation. Although political scientists generally came late to the study of immigration research on attitudes toward immigrants and about immigration, the politics of immigration policy making, the implications of these policies, and immigrant incorporation, including how immigrants are reshaping electorates, is a thriving industry. Morris Levy and Matthew Wright add to our understanding of immigration politics and policy in the United States by making a timely and important contribution to a burgeoning literature on Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants and about immigration. The authors provide theoretically and empirically rich analyses that take the literature beyond a dichotomy that pits economic against cultural anxieties and threats and carves out explanatory space for the role of political values, or what the authors describe as “civic fairness.” Whereas the literature, particularly in recent years, has found greater empirical support for theories centered on cultural as opposed to those focused on economic anxieties and threats, Levy and Wright stir the pot by arguing that civic fairness may, in many cases, outperform rival explanations in explaining Americans’ complex attitudes. For this reason, Immigration and the American Ethos is a must-read.

In the introductory chapter, the authors begin by describing an empirical puzzle, writing that “a great many people hold seemingly divergent—and often perplexing—mixes of opinion as we move from one policy area to the next” (p. 1, emphasis in original here and throughout). Indeed, according to Levy and Wright, of the 48 bivariate correlations that can be calculated using the immigration-related items in the American National Election Study (ANES) from 1992 to the present, only one of these correlations is above 0.5. In other words, survey respondents who support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants can simultaneously express preferences to increase interior immigration enforcement, surge resources and personnel on the southern border, and decrease the overall number of immigrants admitted into the United States, among other combinations. For Levy and Wright, this means that “Americans must be weighing something else” (p. 3) that extends beyond just considerations of economic or cultural anxieties and threats. The authors theorize that this “something else” is a set of political values that they describe as civic fairness. The authors write, “We show that these values not only play a role in public opinion about immigration but that they are more potent than group-centric influences predicated on racial and national identities for most Americans, most of the time” (p. 11, emphasis in the original). It is important to note the language used by the authors. Multiple times in the book, Levy and Wright acknowledge that some Americans do hold uniformly anti-immigrant views that are perhaps best explained by theories rooted in cultural anxieties and threats, or what they describe as “group-centric theories.” Indeed, these theories reflect the entrenched racism, discrimination, and prejudice that exist in American society. However, the authors remain firm that for the large majority of Americans, including the majority of whites, immigration-related preferences can be best understood through their prism of civic fairness.

The authors explain what civic fairness means and how they operationalize it empirically in chapter 2. Levy and Wright define civic fairness as the set of normative beliefs about what the collective “us” owes to immigrants and what immigrants owe in return. More concretely, the authors focus on what they term functional assimilation, formal assimilation, egalitarianism, and humanitarianism. The political values underpinning functional assimilation are beliefs in economic individualism and self-reliance. As Levy and Wright describe them, these values manifest during debates over the skills, education, and English-language ability of the foreign born. Adherence to legalism underpins formal assimilation, which manifests during debates over the legal and citizenship status of the foreign born. Egalitarianism reflects political norms rooted in beliefs about equality of opportunity and manifests particularly when policies reflect ethnic or status-based discrimination. Lastly, the political values underpinning humanitarianism center on beliefs about the importance of helping others and manifest most prominently during debates over refugee and asylum policies, as well as family-based immigration. These civic fairness norms, the political values underpinning them, and how they manifest when it comes to immigration politics and policy are summarized neatly in table 2.1 (p. 39). So, too, are the hypotheses the authors derive from them (see table 2.2, p. 59).

Levy and Wright use original survey experimental data, which are discussed across three empirical chapters, to make vivid the importance of civic fairness in explaining Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants and about immigration. Readers will appreciate that the authors use findings from publicly available survey data to motivate their experimental approach and designs and to externally validate their findings throughout each of the three empirical chapters. The authors also use much ink to explain the scope conditions of their empirical work, as well as its limitations. Chapter 4 presents what may be their strongest empirical work: it takes on public opinion about the legal status of undocumented immigrants. Using a conjoint experiment, Levy and Wright randomly assign respondents to one of three experimental conditions: a “legal” condition, wherein respondents read a vignette and are asked to give a green card to a person who came to the United States legally; an “illegal” condition, wherein respondents read the same vignette and are asked to give a green card to a person who came to the United States illegally; and a “dreamer” condition, wherein respondents read the same vignette and are asked to give a green card to a person who was brought to the United States as a child but entered illegally. Respondents then “rated” two prospective immigrants at a time—that is, choosing to give them a green card or not—for a total of five pairs. The prospective immigrants varied by six characteristics: national origin, employment status, English-language proficiency, educational status, and religion. Given that the characteristics of the prospective immigrants are randomized, this design provides Levy and Wright with leverage to compare across experimental conditions and to analyze results by the distinct characteristics that survey respondents are shown. The main independent variables are measures of formal legalism, egalitarianism, humanitarianism, and ethnocentrism, as well as the standard cohort of control variables.

Consistent with their hypotheses, Levy and Wright find that those who score high on the formal legalism measure do not statistically significantly differ in their predicted probability of giving a green card to prospective immigrants in the legal experimental condition but are statistically significantly less likely to give a green card to prospective immigrants in the illegal and dreamer experimental conditions. Moreover, and also consistent with their hypotheses, the authors find that those who score high on egalitarianism and humanitarianism measures are generally statistically significantly more likely to give green cards to prospective immigrants across all experimental conditions. Importantly, those who score high on the ethnocentrism measure are statistically significantly less likely to give green cards to prospective immigrants across all experimental conditions. It is no surprise that prejudiced Americans are significantly more opposed to immigration, because as Levy and Wright point out, “at least with immigrants’ ethnicity held constant by design, ethnocentrism has no stronger relationship with assessments of illegal immigrants than prospective legal immigrants” (p. 103, emphasis in the original). In other words, because the national origin of the hypothetical immigrants varied randomly, the authors claim that, although the attitudes of highly prejudiced Americans may very well be explained by some form of group centrism, “the great majority who are not so highly ethnocentric draw sharper distinctions between legal and illegal immigration on the basis of legality per se, over and above the attributes controlled in the experiment” (p. 105). Levy and Wright further leverage their conjoint design to regress giving a green card on the characteristics of the prospective immigrants shown to survey respondents. Respondents are more likely to give green cards to those who are employed, have a college degree, and speak English fluently, which the authors take as support for the importance of functional assimilation. More generally, because survey respondents are neither more nor less likely to give green cards based on national origin, Levy and Wright interpret this as an additional blow to the explanatory power of group-centric theories.

In contrast to a burgeoning literature on Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants and about immigration, which grew in importance during the Trump presidency and found greater empirical support for theories centered on cultural as opposed to economic anxieties and threats, Levy and Wright theorize about, and provide empirical evidence to support, a rival explanation centered on political values. The extent to which their argument departs from the recent literature is not lost on Levy and Wright, as sub-headers such as “Is There Madness in Our Method?” and “But It’s Still about Groups!” make clear. Readers would be right to ask whether their prism of civic fairness merely serves as a dog whistle or excuse for racism, discrimination, and prejudice, and whether their experimental approach and designs provide the critical tests necessary to steer an entire literature in a different direction. However, as this literature continues to evolve, researchers would now be remiss if they do not take seriously the role that civic fairness norms may play in explaining attitudes toward immigrants and about immigration.