Harvard's Social Science Statistics Blog links to a paper by Dan Hopkins, another in what appears to be a crowding field of researchers of inter-ethnic attitudes in political science. The paper advances his theory of 'politicized change' argues that 'realistic threat' approaches fail to explain why communities will sometimes get into an uproar over a rising tide of immigration and other times not. Hopkins argues that localized demographic changes, in combination with a political atmosphere that makes immigrants and immigration more salient in national politics and media, dramatically increase the liklihood that communities will hone in on immigration as a local issue.
Incidentally, for a documentary that illustrates exactly what local opposition to immigration looks like, in all its sound and fury, check out Farmingville. It's the story of a small Long Island community divided over a boom in hispanic migrant laborers. Definitely intense, it tends to under-represent moderate voices on the issue, but paints a clear picture of how these kinds of issues can get completely out of hand and - crucially - demonstrates very clearly the impact that national-level politics (and activist networks with a national platform) have on the framing of local issues.
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