Yalidy Matos’s Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics is a timely and detailed examination of how white Americans’ investment in whiteness informs their expressed opinions about immigration politics in the United States. By whiteness, Matos does not refer simply to racial classification. Instead, she draws on a rich interdisciplinary literature—spanning political science, sociology, and critical race studies—to define whiteness as a social role that “comes with a set of norms, beliefs, values, and behaviors that mean white people are part of the group of other whites who choose to do whiteness” (16; emphasis in original). The key “choice” that white Americans have is whether “to produce and reproduce a system structured on white supremacy…or to repudiate it” (1). Altogether, Matos builds a convincing argument that whiteness, and not simply racial identification as White, has long undergirded many aspects of US society, including white Americans’ opinions about what immigration and immigration enforcement should look like.

To develop this argument, Matos marshals an impressive range of secondary survey datasets, with one chapter also making use of congressional roll-call vote data. The secondary datasets include the American National Election Studies (run quadrennially between 2000 and 2016), the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (2018), and the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (2020). These data will be familiar to social scientists of immigration because they are used widely in existing research. Matos’s innovation is to leverage familiar data to ask new research questions about whiteness that may be unfamiliar to some in political science and adjacent fields: “Under what conditions do whites choose to lean toward reproducing whiteness and/or repudiating it, and what role do predispositions play in the moral choices whites make about immigration” (1)? Although the sheer number of results presented throughout the book can sometimes overwhelm the reader, what is admirable is Matos’s command of her datasets and her attention to detail. I tried to distill the most salient of these results here.

The book consists of five main chapters. In chapter 1, Matos builds her novel theoretical framework to reveal an undeniable link between whiteness and immigration politics. She makes three claims. First, she argues that whiteness structures immigration attitudes by framing white Americans’ perceptions of their prized position atop the US racial hierarchy and by maintaining their institutional privileges (27). Second, she claims that immigration attitudes are moral choices about the responsibilities we have to others and therefore demand a politics of accountability (28). Third, she contends that various political and psychological predispositions give meaning to the moral foundations undergirding immigration attitudes, a reflection of socialization into whiteness (28).

Chapter 2 establishes a descriptive link between whiteness, immigration attitudes, and these predispositions. Matos begins by outlining a five-part measure of white Americans’ social identity (66–68): self-identification as white; how important being white is to one’s identity; ethnocentrism, or a preference for the ingroup relative to an outgroup; group consciousness, or the importance of working together to change laws that white Americans perceive to be unfair to their group; and racial privilege, or white Americans’ belief that they enjoy certain advantages because of the color of their skin. Using secondary datasets, she shows that white Americans who believe their race is important to their identity, who are more ethnocentric, who have greater group consciousness, and who are unaware of their racial privilege are the most likely to express anti-immigrant beliefs and oppose pro-immigrant policies. Matos also shows that whiteness and white Americans’ associated beliefs largely reflect five predispositions (59–64): moral traditionalism (i.e., a belief in “traditional” or “normative” family and social organization), authoritarianism (i.e., a belief in absolute submission to authority figures and punishment for deviation from this belief), racial resentment (i.e., anti-Black sentiment masquerading as colorblindness), egalitarianism (i.e., belief in the equality of opportunity for all people), and partisanship (i.e., affiliation with a political party).

Chapter 3 shows how whiteness is associated with white Americans’ immigration policy preferences. Using the predispositions outlined earlier, Matos examines their relationship to white Americans’ support for various restrictive immigration policies, including allowing police checks of legal status, decreasing immigration levels, increasing border security spending, building a border wall, and rescinding birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Between 2000 and 2020, the correlation between whiteness—especially among those with high levels of ethnocentrism and group consciousness—and white Americans’ preferences for punitive immigration policies increases. The predisposition that consistently predicts white Americans’ policy preferences is moral traditionalism, or a preference for maintaining the status quo—and therefore leaving unchanged the social-structural advantages afforded to white people relative to non-white and especially Black Americans. A commitment to whiteness, therefore, encompasses racism and xenophobia.

But, as Matos is careful to remind us, her theory of whiteness differentiates between whiteness as a social role and people who are classified as white. Chapter 4 considers white Americans “who make the decision to do whiteness differently” (129), or those who have progressive immigration attitudes that diverge from group norms. Unlike most of their peers, the white Americans analyzed here have a high awareness of the advantages and privileges afforded to white people. For Matos, this awareness has a causal impact on their immigration policy preferences. “This awareness leads whites to make different decisions,” she writes. “This awareness is a prerequisite for progressive immigration attitudes” (129–30; emphasis mine). Key predictors of white Americans’ awareness of their racial advantage are their gender (i.e., women are more aware than men), educational attainment (i.e., college graduates/higher are more aware), political party (i.e., Democrats and Independents are more aware than Republicans), age (i.e., the younger are more aware), patriotism (i.e., the less patriotic are more aware), and their stance on the national economy (i.e., those believing the economy has not gotten worse are more aware). All the predispositions outlined in chapter 2 are negatively associated with white Americans’ awareness of their racial advantages, and the predispositions attenuate patriotism and educational attainment’s associations with the same (139). Awareness of their racial advantage is associated with greater expressed support among white Americans for pro-immigrant policies (142–43, 147).

Chapter 5 then connects these individual preferences to state politics by examining the roll-call votes of elected representatives on restrictive and nonrestrictive immigrant legislation, using the examples of sanctuary policies that limit at least some subnational police cooperation with federal immigration authorities and of anti-sanctuary policies that facilitate or expand this cooperation. Matos “emphasizes the link between how whiteness operates at the individual level, by means of vote choice for representatives, and how it operates at the institutional state level, by way of elected representatives” (156). She shows descriptive statistics linking state senators’ “yea” and “nay” votes for anti-sanctuary (i.e., AL, IN, SC, TX, UT) and sanctuary (i.e., CA, IL, VT, CO, WA) policies in selected states to the racial demographics of their congressional districts. In general, the less racially or ethnically diverse the district, the more likely a vote against sanctuary or for anti-sanctuary legislation, although strong Latino or foreign-born populations in a district sometimes attenuated this association (166–67, 172–75).

Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics offers much food for thought. Indeed, the sheer wealth of data analyzed opens many questions and possible opportunities for future research and extension. First, what would the analysis and argument have looked like if they had not been limited to white-identified people and their ideological commitments? Although it is no doubt important to examine patterned variation in public opinion among white Americans, expanding the analysis to other racial groups may reveal some of the more pernicious political and moral consequences of whiteness. For example, respectability politics may itself be tethered to whiteness in damaging ways because it is predicated on the hope that white Americans and institutions will accept nonwhite people into some “mainstream” segment of society. We may, therefore, observe that some Black and Latino Americans committed to respectability politics may also demonstrate support for anti-immigrant beliefs and policies. But we may also find a growing segment of nonwhite Americans moving away from respectability politics and toward a cross-racial or cross-ethnic coalition that challenges or opts out of whiteness entirely.

Second, and especially with respect to chapter 4, to what extent can public opinion polling reveal white Americans’ everyday efforts to “do” or “undo” whiteness? More specifically, is expressing support for liberal or progressive policies evidence of “undoing” whiteness? At the root of these questions is a concern about the distorting effect of social desirability bias. White Americans with high awareness of their racial advantage may offer “socially acceptable” answers about public policy in a poll but then vote for candidates who oppose these same policies. Including other outcomes, such as self-reported political donations or involvement in protests or other mass mobilizations, may have revealed whether white Americans in the surveys “put their money with their mouth is,” so to speak. But even if social desirability bias explains chapter 4’s results, I do not think it undermines Matos’s argument. Instead, it may bolster her analysis by emphasizing how whiteness operates as a master social role.

Finally, what is to be done? Matos concludes that white Americans can make “other choices,” such as supporting policies or politicians who do not promote white supremacy (189). But we are presented with few details about how white Americans will come to make such choices. As she notes, rejecting white supremacy “means a sort of loss of identity for whites but a gain in moral life” for white Americans (191). Few will have reasons to make such a choice in a society structured to benefit their racial group. I wondered whether there are institutional reforms implied by the book’s theoretical framework or empirical analysis that would facilitate white Americans making choices that reject white supremacy. For example, if socialization matters for white Americans’ awareness of their own racial privilege, reforms that promote that awareness—by reinvesting in public education, building a collective memory that fully reckons with this country’s history of racism and discrimination, and the like—would seem important for interrupting institutional dynamics of white supremacy.

All told, Yalidy Matos offers a sweeping analysis of the relationship between white Americans’ commitment to whiteness as a social role and their anti-immigrant attitudes. Her book demands a greater societal reckoning with white supremacy in all its forms, including the effects that whiteness has on how US politicians and voters receive and perceive immigrants.