System justification drives Latino support for nativist policies

Abstract

Since Donald Trump’s presidency (2016–2020), political observers have rushed to explain why some Latinos support nativist policies that harm members of their own ethnic group. One hypothesis predicts that Latinos who value their American identity endorse policies that denigrate non-Americans, such as unauthorized immigrants. We propose system justification as an additional motive. Study 1 draws on a representative Latino oversample ( N = 3,950) in the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). We show that higher system justification levels are substantively associated with support for harsher policies toward unauthorized immigrants, independently of American identity, partisanship, and other key covariates. Study 2 refines these results through a preregistered experiment with Latino adults ( N = 1,230). We evaluated system justification and American identity as mediators of support for anti-Latino policies in the domains of unauthorized immigration and affirmative action. Assignment to read about the vibrancy of the American dream (versus control) increased system justification motives, which then strongly boosted support for nativist policies. American identity played no meaningful role. Moreover, the mediated results for nativist policies were large and robust, but small and brittle for affirmative action. We discuss our results’ implications for the political psychology of Latinos—America’s largest ethnic group.