The Causes of American Presidents' Immigration Decisions: A Preliminary Logit Analysis
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Keywords
Pro-Immigration, Anti-Immigration, President, Immigration Statutes
Department
Political Science
Major
Political Science
Abstract
Although the office of the American Presidency would seem to wield enormous power over immigration policy, very few scholars have rigorously examined the roots of Presidents' policy-making in this area. Throughout my preliminary research, I cataloged 91 immigration statutes passed between 1864 and 2001 according to whether the law was pro- or anti-immigration. This data then became the basis for a Logit regression model of whether Presidents supported or opposed immigration. My tentative results suggest that a President's religious identification, ancestry, and racial ideology have affected their actions on immigration. In contrast, the partisanship of the President or Congress, wartime conditions, election years, nativity of his parents, and the year the law was passed, had no statistically significant effect.
Faculty Mentor
Joel Fetzer
Funding Source or Research Program
Academic Year Undergraduate Research Initiative
Presentation Session
Session B
Start Date
23-4-2021 3:45 PM
End Date
23-4-2021 4:00 PM
The Causes of American Presidents' Immigration Decisions: A Preliminary Logit Analysis
Although the office of the American Presidency would seem to wield enormous power over immigration policy, very few scholars have rigorously examined the roots of Presidents' policy-making in this area. Throughout my preliminary research, I cataloged 91 immigration statutes passed between 1864 and 2001 according to whether the law was pro- or anti-immigration. This data then became the basis for a Logit regression model of whether Presidents supported or opposed immigration. My tentative results suggest that a President's religious identification, ancestry, and racial ideology have affected their actions on immigration. In contrast, the partisanship of the President or Congress, wartime conditions, election years, nativity of his parents, and the year the law was passed, had no statistically significant effect.