Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants by James McCann and Michael Jones-Correa offers a critical and important examination of Latino immigrant political behavior during the Trump era. The authors set out to address the following question: How have immigrants themselves responded to these unprecedented White House attacks on their dignity and place in American society?

To be sure, moments of exclusionary and hostile anti-immigrant sentiment are nothing new in American politics and history. Antagonism to newcomers can be traced back to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, and the 2017 Muslim Ban. Although previous scholars have examined immigrant political behavior during these different periods, McCann and Jones-Correa’s new book provides us with a comprehensive analysis of immigrants’ political preferences, attitudes, and behaviors. In particular, they explore three distinct areas of political behavior: (1) immigrant political incorporation, (2) faith and trust in government and attachment to American society, and (3) political participation that includes both electoral and nonelectoral participation.

To conduct their analysis on these various aspects of Latino immigrant behavior, the authors embarked on an original data collection effort, which culminated in the creation of their Latino Immigrant National Election Studies. This survey went into the field both before and after the 2016 presidential election. Given the focus on foreign-born Latinos, the sample comprised predominantly bilingual or Spanish-dominant survey respondents, and nearly all (90%) of the respondents chose to conduct the phone-based interview in Spanish. There is much to appreciate in the authors’ panel survey design, because it allows them to assess whether there is a causal relationship between one’s emotions (pessimism, anger, and anxiety) and trust in and attitudes toward government. At the same time, one of the drawbacks of a panel survey design is the attrition rates of respondents from one panel to another, and it affected this survey as well. The authors address this issue by using an imputation strategy to deal with missing data and by replenishing the samples during the subsequent panels. The survey itself contains a rich and extensive battery of survey items pertaining to civic stressors, attitudes toward and trust in government, and respondents’ self-reported political behavior and attitudes. By itself, this impressive data collection effort will be a valuable contribution to immigration scholars and Latino politics scholars and will no doubt be used for years to come.

This survey data yields a number of important insights, and the overarching conclusion is reflected succinctly in the book’s title: Latino immigrants are holding fast. That is, despite the steady stream of anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, foreign-born Latinos remained resilient and steadfast in their faith and trust in government, as well as in their attachments to American society. The specific emotions of pessimism, anger, and anxiety exerted a minimal impact on their trust in government and broader attitudes toward the federal government. Despite the claims by many political pundits and the media, the authors found no evidence of a hard or soft exiting among Latino immigrants. Moreover, foreign-born Latinos did not hide in the shadows; their levels of political participation and engagement remained strong during this time period, particularly with respect to their participation in protest activity. Yet the analysis reveals that protest activity was uneven: younger Latino immigrants were more likely to engage in in it than older ones. Those who were worried that friends or family members might be deported were also more likely to engage in protest activity than those with no such concerns. Notably, concerns about deportation outweighed worries over personal finances in helping explain who decides to engage in protest.

McCann and Jones-Correa’s in-depth analysis of the relationship between emotions and political preferences contributes to an exciting body of work examining racial differences in the way that emotions shape political thought and action. Davin Phoenix’s (The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics, 2019) recent work, for example, demonstrates how anger fails to mobilize whites and Blacks in the same manner: being angry generally is less of a mobilizer for Black Americans than it is for white Americans. In instances when anger is a mobilizing force for Black Americans, such emotion is directed toward activism by way of marches, protests, and demonstrations. In contrast, anger leads whites to participate in more typical forms of political behavior, such as turning out to vote. Importantly, Phoenix goes beyond the Black–white dichotomy to determine whether his theory can also be applied to Latinos and Asian Americans. Of course, given that the social positioning of both Latinos and Asians is unique, he expects anger to function differently for these groups than for whites. McCann and Jones-Correa’s findings support this contention and highlight the problems of assuming that one particular explanatory variable will operate consistently and uniformly across all ethnic/racial groups (Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn. The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion and Immigration, 2013). As these scholars contend, the context of reception and America’s racial hierarchy are important factors that shape how these emotions interact with political activity. Future studies would also be well served to examine how other, more positive emotions, such as hope and optimism, affect the political attitudes and behavior of Latino immigrants.

Ultimately, the research findings presented in Holding Fast set the stage for future scholars to address a whole range of research questions. For example, one could imagine designing a cohort study of young foreign-born Latinos who were socialized in this particularly politicized era. Did participating in the marches and protests politicize them in such a way that it positively changed their cognitive schema? Much like the research conducted by Lisa Garcia Bedolla (Fluid Borders: Power, Identity and Politics in Los Angeles, 2005) on Latino youth in the wake of Proposition 187, there is strong reason to believe that coming of age in the Trump presidency will uniquely shape the political mindset of young Latino immigrants and serve as a “crystallizing” moment (David Sears and Nicholas Valentino, “Politics Matters: Political Events as Catalysts for Preadult Socialization,” American Political Science Review, 1997). Such an event has the potential to shape not only their partisan preferences but also their opinions on immigration (Marisa Abrajano and Lydia Lundgren, “How Watershed Immigration Policies Affect American Public Opinion over a Lifetime," International Migration Review, 2014). That being the case, we can expect that Latino immigrants who came of age during the Trump years will recognize themselves as firmly belonging to the polity, much in the same way that Latino youth felt in the wake of Proposition 187.

Only time will tell whether Latino immigrants’ resilience and steadfastness will produce long-term civic change and engagement, but if the past is any indicator, we have strong reason for optimism. The work by Adrian Pantoja and Gary Segura (“Fear and Loathing in California: Contextual Threat and Political Sophistication among Latino Voters,” Political Behavior, 2003), Pantoja and colleagues (“Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity: Patterns in Political Mobilization by Naturalized Latinos,” Political Research Quarterly, 2001), and Garcia Bedolla (2005) all revealed the mobilizing power that anti-immigration rhetoric exerted on Latino immigrant behavior. Not only will the next 5 to 10 years potentially lead millions of Latino immigrants to consider themselves as full participants in the US political system, they will also very likely result in millions of Latino immigrants engaging in the naturalization process. This fine book gives us reason for hope about an American future that includes them.