Democratic representation : the immigrant American case
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[EMBARGOED UNTIL 12/01/2025] Descriptive and substantive representation links have been found for minority groups such as women and various racial/ethnic minorities. Extant research has not examined whether the link exists for other minority groups, such as immigrant Americans. I ask if legislators with recent immigrant heritage play a disproportionate role in providing substantive representation--in the form of immigration and alienage bill sponsorship--to immigrant Americans relative to their non-immigrant colleagues. This form of substantive representation captures a legislator's involvement with this policy area over others, not whether the policy is 'pro-' or 'anti-' immigrant. I tested this theory for the 2023 regular sessions of eight states where the top migrant group to the U.S. has settled and where immigration activity and policy are salient. Using an original dataset of legislators' public immigrant heritage information gathered from official websites and newspapers, I use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to test my hypotheses. The dyadic representation results show that an individual legislator's recent immigrant heritage cannot predict a legislator's shares of sponsored immigration and alienage legislation, except in Nevada. The state-by-state results indicate a single legislator with recent immigrant heritage is not enough, and neither are a few legislators, to substantively represent migrants. In other states, other factors mattered more than recent immigrant heritage in predicting whether a legislator would represent migrants through policy representation. Despite the individual-level results, collectively, when these legislators serve in legislatures with the highest shares of legislators with recent immigrant heritage, they sponsor more immigration and alienage legislation than their counterparts. I also examine substantive representation by non-descriptive representatives of other historically excluded backgrounds (i.e., women and racial/ethnic minorities). Individually, these legislators do not have an inclination or reservation for providing policy representation for migrants. The exceptions to this result were Black legislators, Democrats, and legislators representing districts with majority-minority voting-age populations (VAPs). Still, collectively, both legislatures with the highest shares of racial/ethnic diversity and legislatures with the highest shares of women had legislators who provided less policy representation for migrants than predominantly white legislatures and predominantly male legislatures.
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Ph. D.