Using data from the UC-Berkeley California Survey (a/k/a the Field Poll), we will test a series of hypotheses about the relationship, which we expect to be positive, between real and perceived COVID19 threat and attitudes towards immigration, immigrants, and ethnoracial minorities. Sociological theory, prior research, and historical experience all suggest that immigrants are vulnerable during periods of infectious-disease threat. Drawing on her African fieldwork but generalizing to societies of all kinds, Douglas (1984) note the universal fear of pollution and the universality of rituals employed to protect the social body from contamination. Douglas argues that ritual contamination results from persons and things that are “out of place,” that enter domains in which are liminal, lacking a clear status. Work in this line has noted a homology in modern societies between rhetorical treatments, on the one hand, of immigrants, as outsiders inhabiting a liminal status, and, on the other, of infectious disease, both of which have been depicted dangerous forms of, respectively, social and corporeal penetration (Santa Ana 1999; Cisneros 2008). One may infer from this that concern about infectious disease may stimulate anti-immigrant attitudes among susceptible publics. And, indeed, the historical record contains many examples of immigrant scapegoating in the U.S. during public health emergencies like the typhus and cholera epidemics of the early 1890s (Markel 1999), the bubonic plague outbreaks of 1900-1908 (Chase 2004), and the 1917-18 flu pandemic (Kraut 2010). Since January, reports of hate crimes against Asians blamed for the rise of COVID19 have proliferated (Chapman 2020). Compared to work by historians, anthropologists, and discourse analysts, empirical social-scientific research has been relatively scarce. A recent study (Aaroe, Petersen and Arceneaux 2017) suggests that this elision of immigrant and infectious disease may have a biological foundation. Dutta and Rao (2014) propose that “anxieties about infectious disease not only prime concerns about foreigners as disease threats but also prime the concerns about cultural outgroups as sources of cultural contamination.” They conducted a survey experiment that demonstrated a decline in support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants when respondents were primed with a fictionalized description of a contagious disease originating in a foreign country; and paired this with an historical study demonstrating that resistance to British colonialists was greater in parts of India that had experienced more severe exposure to a cholera epidemic several months earlier. The emergence of COVID19 as a contemporary pandemic offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between disease threat and attitudes toward immigrants in real time. This study takes advantage of a survey of ~9000 California registered voters, carried out by the UC-Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies in April 2020, which included a large battery of questions about COVID19 and a number of items tapping attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. We will use data from this study to test several hypotheses about the relationship between (a) perceived vulnerability to COVID19 infection, (b) priming with questions about COVID19, and (c) local prevalence of COVID19 to (a) attitudes toward immigrants and (b) attitudes toward immigration. The results of this study will help to determine the validity of an influential body of theory on group boundaries and intergroup relations. If the hypotheses receive some support, the pattern of results (including variation in effects on attitudes toward different minority groups) will provide insight into the extent to which effects are specific to scapegoated groups or instead generalize to all groups perceived as outsiders to the ethnoracial mainstream. With respect to public policy, in so far as the hypotheses are confirmed, the results will alert civic leaders, law enforcement, educators, and others to challenges that may result from increased intergroup conflict and scapegoating of immigrant Americans during and in the wake of the current pandemic.
