Date of Award
2018
Abstract
Recently, the American political spotlight has focused on the phenomena of legal and illegal immigration due to controversy over who should be allowed to enter the country. However, it is still hard to say with certainty what particular groups, such as university students, actually think about these issues, and whether or not it is possible to predict their attitudes based on certain demographic variables. This project seeks to uncover an answer to the latter question by analyzing the effects of political affiliation, religion, and social class on attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration using data from a survey administered to 123 undergraduate university students at a Midwestern Jesuit liberal arts school. The OLS regression results demonstrate that not all of the independent variables affect these attitudes. When trying to predict support for legal and illegal immigration, political ideology and religious group affiliation are significant. These findings may be used to formulate possible policy suggestions for Jesuit liberal arts schools in the future, which can hopefully improve attitudes toward immigrants within the United States.
Recommended Citation
Sprenger, Kelsey, "To Build a Wall or Open the Borders: An Analysis of Immigration Attitudes Among Undergraduate University Students" (2018). Senior Honors Projects. 107.
https://collected.jcu.edu/honorspapers/107
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