This cross-national study examines how ethnic resources shape access to financial capital among first-generation Punjabi-Pakistani immigrant entrepreneurs in the precious metals industries of Manchester (UK) and Dubai (UAE). Based on 50 semi-structured interviews (August 2022–July 2023) and analyzed through Template Analysis, the findings show that while co-ethnic social capital is widely mobilized across both contexts, significant intra-ethnic variations emerge between Khandani (lineage-based) and non-Khandani entrepreneurs. Khandani entrepreneurs rapidly accumulate start-up capital by leveraging their reputational credibility and transnational embeddedness, securing preferential access to large-scale financing through Rotating Credit Associations (kameti). By contrast, non-Khandani entrepreneurs face delayed entry, relying on modest loans from kin and co-ethnic migrants, with limited capacity to scale. The study highlights how lineage-based prestige intersects with broader kinship networks (Biraderi), producing differentiated trajectories of immigrant entrepreneurship. By foregrounding intra-ethnic stratification, this research extends debates on ethnic resources and mixed embeddedness, demonstrating that not all co-ethnic capital is equally accessible, and that transnational contexts reproduce rather than neutralize status hierarchies.

This article examines how the California Reparations Task Force (2021–23), a government advisory body, grappled with the question of which Black Americans should be eligible for reparations. Some Task Force members and activists advocated a lineage approach that restricts eligibility to people whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. Others supported a Pan-African approach that includes all Black residents. The Task Force voted narrowly for the lineage approach. Surprisingly, however, and not acknowledged by most observers, most of the Task Force’s Final Report implicitly adopted a tiered approach, which follows the lineage approach for some policies and the Pan-African approach for others. It also includes universal policies for all, as long as they include a reparatory dimension. The Final Report thus challenged the assumption that all reparations policies would follow a single standard of eligibility. The tiered approach emerged in part because it complies with United Nations guidelines on reparations. It appears more likely than the other approaches to increase public support for reparations.

In the United States, Latinos are often treated as a monolithic voting bloc, but this approach overlooks significant variation in political behavior across sub-groups from different countries of origin. This paper explores the role of country of origin (CoO) in shaping the partisanship and electoral choices of U.S. Latinos, arguing that national origin influences party identification and voting behavior. Using data from the Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), spanning elections from 2008 to 2020, we examine how Latino voters from different countries differ in their partisanship and support for Republican and Democratic candidates. Our findings reveal substantial variation in vote choice and partisan identification based on CoO. We employ genetic matching to control for key covariates, revealing that aggregate country-of-origin differences show up repeatedly in elections over time. These results suggest that aggregating Latinos into a single voting bloc obscures meaningful political diversity and that a country-of-origin approach offers valuable insights into Latino electoral behavior.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend toward the formalization of circular migration. This formalization is perceived as a mutually beneficial win-win arrangement: host countries secure labor, source countries establish a reliable system of remittances that contribute to development, and migrants are positioned as individuals attaining access to secure and better employment. Labor contractors have been made important in this context, as they play a role in forming linkages, managing a steady supply of workers, managing bureaucratic procedures, training workers, and becoming a buffer between labor and capital. While the dominant debate has been on blaming the labor contractors for the exploitation of migrant workers and creating precarious forms of work, this paper uses racialization theory to locate their role against the backdrop of enforcing return, fragmented labor management, upward capital concentration, and downward labor outsourcing. Using the case of Thai migrant workers who work seasonally in the berry farms of Sweden, it highlights a fundamental contradiction in the current regime of transient servitude: migrant worker is desired, yet the individuals embodying it are not. In so doing, an array of contractual and extra-contractual mechanisms is employed, which reinforces deeply racialized ideologies, stereotypes, and institutions. The use of labor contractors is one such mechanism. Utilizing racialization theory, the thesis identifies enforced return of migrants and the pursuit of an ideal worker as crucial components in the formalization of transnational circular migration. Deportation, rather than being an ultimate objective of enforcing return, serves to deepen the inherent vulnerability experienced by workers who grapple with the understanding that their deportability is an intrinsic aspect of their existence. This reinforcement further amplifies deeply entrenched racialized forms of insecurity, where laborers form a permanent labor force of the temporarily employed. To ensure that migrant workers are at the forefront of recruitment for specific types of low-paying and precarious work, employers strategically employ racialized narratives, portraying them as invaluable assets by emphasizing their perceived strong “work ethic” and reliability. This depiction elevates them to the status of “good workers,” surpassing the local labor alternative. It underscores that capital’s demand extends beyond a mere requirement for labor power; it necessitates labor power that can be exploited.

Latinas and Asian American women are often labeled “women of color” (WOC). But taking up the identity of WOC is a choice; not all Latinas and Asian American women self-identify as WOC. Building on intersectionality theory and recent work on “of color” identities, we propose that WOC identification has the potential to translate into broader political alliances with other marginalized groups. We evaluate this expectation with data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). We added a survey question about self-identification as WOC to the 2020 CMPS, making research possible about the nature and implications of the WOC ID. We theorize that Latinas and Asian American women who self-identify as WOC will be more supportive of policies that disproportionately benefit marginalized outgroups. We find evidence that WOC ID is positively related to supporting these policies, as hypothesized. We also investigate whether racial resentment limits the effects of WOC ID and discuss the implications. We argue that this study demonstrates the significance of the WOC identity and its role in the creation of political coalitions.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police in 2020, polls showed White Democrats as the most racially progressive group of Americans. In this paper, we examine this group’s racial progressiveness. Using the racial resentment scale deployed in the American National Election Studies, we show that the youngest generation of White Democrats has become more liberal on race when compared to older generations of Democrats and both younger and older generations of Republicans. We examine White Democrats’ racial attitudes further using four framing experiments that we embed in a nationally representative survey. The experiments demonstrate that younger generations of Democrats are often, but not always, the group most supportive of progressive racial rhetoric when compared to older Democrats, Republicans in their generation, and older Republicans. Older Democrats often mirror the attitudes of their younger counterpart. Thus, we find that racial attitudes are shaped not just by generation but also by partisan cues. Last, when it comes to reparations, young Democrats are merely less hostile to the policy than other groups in our sample but do not endorse reparations. Overall, our findings thus suggest that while younger generations of Democrats are sometimes more progressive in their racial attitudes than other groups, their racial attitudes are somewhat inconsistent. While they support racially egalitarian rhetoric, they do not express the same level of support for a policy designed to create equal material conditions.

In this article, I argue racialized EU externalization interacts with and reinforces the anti-Black racism within Tunisia’s border regime. I analyze EU–Tunisia relations through the lens of racial capitalism, arguing that Tunisia’s cooperation with external actors, including on migration matters, is connected to maintaining models of capitalist accumulation and punishing dissent. The aim of this contemporary cooperation is not to prevent the mobility of migrants entirely, but to limit, control, and exploit it. Both the EU and Tunisia suspend different racialized migrant groups in a situation of irregularity and precarity to create and maintain exploitable labor, while avoiding the political unpopularity of “regularizing” migrants. We are seeing the violent and deadly consequences of intensified racialized border regimes both within Europe, in the context of a contemporary crisis of neoliberalism, and in post-transition Tunisia, faced with its own overlapping social, political, and economic crises. Thus, by exploring the entanglements of racialized bordering practices that operate across the Mediterranean, I go beyond reductive state-by-state analysis, revealing EU externalization as part of a broader project of racialized bordering essential to global racial capitalism.

Commemorations of the Confederacy remain pervasive throughout the Southern U.S. Historians have long established that many of these symbols were erected during the Jim Crow era to reinforce white political dominance in public spaces. Yet, little is known about how these enduring symbols shape perceptions among people of different racial identities today. This study examines Confederate monuments where they are most prominently placed: courthouse grounds. Using an original survey experiment of Black, white, and Latino Southerners, it investigates whether the presence of a Confederate monument in front of a courthouse influences feelings of personal safety and welcomeness, as well as perceptions of the fairness of the court system. Findings reveal that a Confederate monument made Black and Latino Southerners feel less safe and welcome at the courthouse and led Black Southerners to perceive the court system as less fair toward people like them. In contrast, Confederate monuments had no overall effect on white Southerners’ perceptions of courthouses or the judicial system. These results underscore the role of contentious symbols in reinforcing inequalities in public spaces.

This study examines the political participation of undocumented Mexican immigrants residing in the United States in Mexican external voting. As international mobility of people has increased globally, scholarly attention has grown concerning how overseas citizens engage in electoral processes in their countries of origin. However, previous studies based on traditional survey methods may have yielded biased results due to the underrepresentation of undocumented immigrants, who are less likely to enroll in survey company panels due to concerns about the potential compromise of their identities. To include this hard-to-reach population and conduct representative sampling, our research employs a method called respondent-driven sampling (RDS), which permits the surveying of a population devoid of a sampling frame. Our analysis of the Mexican case demonstrates that a lack of electoral information, lower levels of education, and heightened distrust of the Mexican government are associated with diminished electoral participation.

Partisanship and feelings about racial groups are increasingly linked among whites in the United States. Does this pattern extend to other Americans? To answer this question, we begin by examining trends in what has been termed “affective differentiation”—a measure of racial affect that is, in our case, the difference in ratings between one’s own group and white Americans—and partisanship to demonstrate first that affective differentiation has increased. Further, this measure of racial affect has a growing relationship with partisanship among Black and Latine Americans such that Democratic identification is associated with higher levels of affective differentiation. Next, using panel data from the two most recent presidential elections we find that the direction of influence flows from partisanship to affective differentiation. Higher levels of attachment to the Democratic Party are associated with greater affective differentiation in which respondents rate their own group more favorably than whites. In recent elections, there has been a stark polarization among political parties regarding the utilization of explicit racial rhetoric. Members of the electorate have taken notice, leading partisans to update their racial attitudes.

As global migration continues to intensify, legislatures in liberal democracies increasingly feature policymakers with direct experiences with immigration. Concurrently, scholars often argue that electoral accountability creates incentives to appeal to public opinion, which in the context of immigration policymaking favors restrictions over admission. In this paper, we study these competing dynamics among these immigrant legislators. We theorize that political institutions—particularly political parties—impede the sincere expression of legislative preferences among legislators that come from immigrant backgrounds. To begin, we present stylized facts about legislative behavior drawing on roll-call votes from the Canadian, British, and American legislatures. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with representatives, we find strong evidence that the threat of political party sanction and individual concerns about legislators’ own parties affects legislative decision-making. These findings contribute to our understanding of legislative accountability and highlight how the trend of increasing immigration to democratic polities does not directly translate to political representation.

While prior studies have consistently linked immigration attitudes with public support for the welfare state, it is not yet clear how individuals process immigrant-related information in their home contexts and combine that with their existing immigration attitudes to update their attitudes toward the welfare state. In this paper, we consider how context (i.e., immigrant welfare participation rates in individuals’ home states) works in tandem with immigration attitudes to shape Americans’ support for the welfare state. We merge state contextual data on the welfare consumption rates of immigrants with micro-level public opinion data from the Cumulative American National Election Survey (CANES) for the years from 2004 to 2016. Our results suggest that individuals’ immigration attitudes and the degree of immigrant welfare participation in their home contexts combine to influence Americans’ welfare spending attitudes. More specifically, among individuals with unfavorable immigration attitudes, higher levels of immigrant welfare participation in their state contexts lead to significantly lower levels of welfare support. Likewise, in states with high-immigrant welfare participation rates, negative immigration attitudes have a stronger negative effect on welfare support. These findings suggest that Americans’ support for the welfare state is not only determined by their existing immigration attitudes but also the reality of immigrant welfare usage in their home contexts.

This paper examines the complex political-economic processes that shape contemporary forced displacement from Guatemala to the U.S. The study was driven by the following research question: How does capitalism and the historical context of forced migration in Guatemala relate to the creation and development of migrant-led organizations in the U.S. and the various types of leadership and political participation? Examining the political economy of Guatemalan migration to the Greater Los Angeles region and the activities of migrants and community organizations, I argue that neoliberal capitalism not only provokes the displacement of Guatemalan migrants as a social class of people from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, but it has also contributed to the emergence of distinct political Guatemalan diaspora organizations in the U.S. at the community, national, and transnational level. Furthermore, due to historical social relations in Guatemala, organizations have emerged in Southern California along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. Moreover, activism emerges within destination countries because exploitation and exclusion take on distinct forms beyond the specific economic and political forces that generate displacement in migrants’ origin countries. As such, these organizations have made significant contributions by safeguarding the human rights of Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. and have emerged based on the differences and inequalities faced by indigenous communities compared to non-indigenous (mestizo/ladino) groups as they and their organizations endure processes of “exclusionary inclusion” in the U.S.

The American public is increasingly affectively polarized. A growing body of research has associated affective polarization with two key phenomena: ideological polarization and social group sorting. Although there is ample evidence that social group sorting, particularly along racial and ethnic lines, is driving Republicans’ affect toward the Democratic Party, it is not clear how it shapes Democrats’, particularly White Democrats’, feelings toward the predominantly White Republican Party. We propose a third model that bridges these two theoretical approaches, a racial ideology model that helps explain Democrats’ feelings toward the Republican Party. Specifically, we argue that Democrats increasingly dislike Republicans because Republicans are seen as standing in opposition to racially progressive policies. Using a preregistered conjoint experiment, we find that Americans across party lines see Republicans as opposing efforts to reduce racial inequality and that this perception is associated with negative affect toward the Republican Party among both White and non-White Democrats.

The relative education model holds that educational attainment reflects existing socioeconomic advantages that are associated with participation rather than spurring political participation on its own. Yet, emerging research on compensation effects suggests that greater educational attainment leads to increased political engagement among more marginal populations in which political socialization is less likely to occur outside of schools. We argue that the relative education model will better describe the relationship between education and voting patterns among more advantaged groups. We test our expectations by estimating the relative education model within racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. using data from the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement from 1978 to 2020. We find that for relatively highly educated White and Asian American voters, each additional year of education yields diminishing returns to turnout. For Black and Latino voters, additional years of education are positively associated with turnout regardless of relative education. The results suggest that opportunities remain to reduce racial turnout gaps and boost political participation by addressing racial gaps in educational attainment.

The U.S. Supreme Court is often regarded as an impartial arbiter of justice, yet various prejudices may influence its decisions. This article examines Supreme Court justices’ biases, focusing on how they invoke racialized stereotypes of criminality. We argue that justices are more likely to vote in favor of white, nonviolent litigants, reinforcing stereotypes that depict nonwhite defendants as inherently more criminal and violent. Drawing on the U.S. Supreme Court Database’s criminal procedure cases from 2005–2017, combined with an original dataset of litigants’ racial identities, we estimate a series of multilevel logistic regressions. Our findings show that litigant race, crime type, and justice ideology jointly shape judicial votes. We further investigate how bias appears in justices’ written opinions, revealing language that perpetuates racialized conceptions of criminality. Overall, our results underscore the Court’s role in constructing what it means to be both “criminal” and “nonwhite,” suggesting that the Court is not a neutral interpreter of law, but an institution shaped by broader social and political biases.

This article examines the everyday experiences of the Egyptian minority in Milan, Italy, focusing on challenges arising from the lack of formal recognition for their religious affiliations—Islam and Coptic Orthodoxy—which are central to their ethnic identity. Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of recognition, Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ coloniality framework, it critiques how European policies conflate secularization with security, marginalizing non-European communities. Italy’s legal system highlights this tension: while de jure constitutional protections guarantee religious freedom, de facto bureaucratic and political barriers exclude minority faiths from equal standing. Egyptian migrants must navigate this imbalance, where theoretical rights rarely translate into practical access, forcing them to continually adapt their religious and ethnic identities in a marginalizing society. The article shows how religious invisibility sustains marginalization, contrasting Europe’s multicultural ideals with exclusionary practices. It reveals how colonial legacies shape migrant experiences and restrict rights.

In the United States, the public does not view all refugee groups with equal favorability. Why do individuals express more support for some refugee groups compared to others? We argue that some Americans are more supportive of certain refugee groups when they share a racial identity because it is easier for them to empathize with them. While recent research points to empathy as a useful tool for cultivating supportive attitudes toward refugees and immigrants, the political science literature lacks a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which empathy drives pro-social attitudes toward refugees, specifically with regard to racial dynamics. Does empathy allow people to overcome their racial ingroup preferences, or does it magnify them? With an original web experiment administered to a 50/50 Black and white sample of Americans, we prime half of the sample to associate refugees with their racial ingroup and prime the other half with their racial outgroup. We find that refugee race only affects support for refugees among white individuals with low group empathy. For high-empathy whites and Blacks of all levels of empathy, the race linked to refugees does not condition their support for refugees. Rather, group empathy is a strong, independent explanation for variation in attitudes toward refugees. We also find modest evidence that the positive association between empathy for refugees and support for this group is driven by partisanship, particularly for whites. The direct effect of partisanship on support for refugees is much stronger. This study contributes to research on the dynamics of race, empathy, and attitudes toward refugees.

In this paper, we demonstrate that the federal enforcement of the 15th Amendment is necessary for Black representation in the U.S. South. Using novel data on Black officeholders in the South from 1866 to 1912 and from 1969 to 1993, we examine Black representation during Reconstruction and after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In both political periods, we find that policies aimed to enforce the 15th Amendment and active Black political participation are necessary preconditions for Black officeholding. This paper helps contextualize scholarship on descriptive representation by identifying this critical link between democracy and representation in the American South. By analyzing broad periods of history, we demonstrate the enduring necessity of active policymaking to ensure fair elections as a precondition of democracy in the American South. Our findings carry significant consequences for understanding the health of American democracy in the twenty-first century.

Narratives and studies of Latino partisanship often emphasize Democratic identification, but some have recently suggested a shift towards Republicans. We address these by examining Latino party identification over a 34-year period, leveraging 35 national surveys with a total of over 103,000 Latino respondents along with Census data to create post-stratified survey weights to correct for biases. We emphasize changing partisanship over time by nativity, birth cohorts, and by national origin. From 2000 to 2012, we observed a slight overall increase in Democratic identification and a decrease in Republican identification, but this was driven by foreign-born Latinos. After 2012, we see declining Democratic identification overall, greater Republican identification among foreign-born and older native-born Latinos, and accelerating Independent identification among native-born Millennial and Gen Z Latinos. These results show that generational turnover and differences by nativity challenge extant theories of Latino partisan change over time.