Estimating anti-immigrant sentiment for the American states using multi-level modeling and post-stratification, 2004-2008

An estimate is provided of an innovative state-level measure of anti-immigrant sentiment for use in future policy and behavioral studies. State governments became increasingly active in adopting immigrant policies in the 2000s. Previous research highlights the role of public opinion, especially attitudes toward immigrants, in explaining policy priorities and outcomes. Unfortunately, most extant studies utilize political ideology or immigrant populations as rough proxies for public opinion. In this article, we estimate a reliable and valid measure of anti-immigrant sentiment at the state-level using survey aggregation with multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) for the period 2004 to 2008. We compare our estimates of anti-immigrant sentiment to alternative measures of immigrant presence and political ideology in predicting multiple variations of state immigrant policies. Ultimately, we find theoretical and statistical advantages of using anti-immigrant sentiment over previous measures in predicting immigrant policies.