Relational skill assets and anti-immigrant sentiments

Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270–289

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Relational skill assets and anti-immigrant sentiments Naeyun Lee, Cheol-Sung Lee ⇑ Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, United States

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 24 January 2013 Revised 11 January 2015 Accepted 1 February 2015 Available online 16 February 2015 Keywords: Anti-immigrant sentiment Anti-immigrant attitudes Occupational skills Relational skills

a b s t r a c t This study introduces the role of relational skill assets in accounting for attitudes toward immigrants: relational skill assets. Drawing upon stratification researchers’ notion of ‘‘non-cognitive skills,’’ we build a theoretical framework highlighting the role of occupational skill requirements in explaining anti-immigrant sentiment. Then, utilizing two occupation-specific measures, interpersonal skill requirement and instrumental skill requirement, we construct an explanatory factor, relational skill specificity. We test its effect on anti-immigrant attitudes as well as on the concentration of foreign-born workers in occupations, using the 2004 national identity module of General Social Survey. The findings confirm our argument that workers with a higher possession of interpersonal skill assets relative to instrumental skill assets are exposed to less intense competitions with immigrants, and are therefore less likely to express anti-immigrant sentiments. Our findings suggest that occupational-level relational skill assets based on sociocultural differences play an important role in shaping native workers’ attitudes’ toward immigrants. Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Growing numbers of immigrants have transformed socio-economic and demographic structures in advanced industrial countries. Native populations in these rich countries have developed varied responses to the newcomers from developing countries. While some native workers show favorable attitudes toward migrants, others exhibit hostility. In an attempt to understand these responses, social scientists, on one hand, have sought to identify the determinants of natives’ responses to immigrants, mostly by underscoring individuals’ social and demographic aspects (Espenshade and Hempstead, 1996; Semyonov et al., 2002), perceived threats on group interests (Blumer, 1958; Bobo and Hutchings, 1996) or cross-national variations in structural conditions such as population composition and unemployment (Quillian, 1995; Semyonov et al., 2006). Meanwhile, on the other hand, scholars of labor market have applied their utilitarian ways of thinking to interpreting the growing anti-immigrant sentiments in Western societies, by emphasizing the role of skill-based labor-market competition (Borjas et al., 1997). In their perspective, the basis of anti-immigrant sentiment originates primarily from fierce competition between low-skilled natives and immigrant workers. The recent theoretical developments and applications advance this line of labor-market competition theory by incorporating trade theories such as the Heckscher-Ohlin family of factor endowment models: skilled workers will move from rich, skill-abundant countries to poor, labor-abundant countries, while unskilled workers will move from poor to rich countries, thereby driving unskilled workers in rich countries in vulnerable positions (Scheve and Slaughter, 2001; Mayda, 2006; O’Rourke and Sinnott, 2006; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010). Based on this logic,

⇑ Corresponding author at: 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, United States. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. Lee), [email protected] (Cheol-Sung Lee). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.02.004 0049-089X/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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unskilled native workers in rich countries will be more discontented with the influx of unskilled immigrants, as it increases competition in the labor market already exacerbated by the rise of the service economy. We find that there are unexplored dimensions for explanatory variables in these studies of attitudes toward immigration, and introduce a new independent variable: the role of occupation-specific relational skills. Conventional approaches in this area mostly treat skills as a general construct of human capital (Becker, 1964). Students of attitudes toward immigrants pay their primary attention to labor market competitions based on skill levels, structural conditions such as the size of out-group populations and unemployment at regional level (Quillian, 1995; Kunovich, 2004; Semyonov et al., 2006). Scholars of immigrant labor, on the other hand, have concentrated on the effect of human and social capital on immigrant earnings. This study argues that two components of relational skills, interpersonal and instrumental skills, play a critical role in shaping anti-immigrant sentiments. We will propose two causal mechanisms: (1) first, the notion of relational skill specificity will capture the degree of transferability of skill assets across different cultures and societies, which will eventually determine workers’ occupational-specific exposure to competitions with immigrants; (2) second, it will also represent ‘personality traits and facets’ (Heckman and Kautz, 2012) that involve intellectual and emotional openness, trust, and unselfishness, arising from pre- and post-labor market training. We assume that these ‘personality traits,’ correlated with occupational skill requirements, will also determine workers’ sentiments toward immigrants. In the subsequent sections, we propose three sets of hypotheses and causal explanations that link occupation-specific relational skills with anti-immigrant sentiments, and then test them with a General Social Survey module (National Identity, 2004).

2. Theoretical discussions This study highlights the significance of ‘occupational-level relational skill standards’ in accounting for attitudes toward immigrants. We define ‘relational skill standards’ as average skill requirements of an occupation needed for workers to perform appropriate levels of job-specific tasks in their interactions with people and tools.1 Specifically, they refer to occupational skill requirements of a worker’s functional tasks in relation to ‘people’ such as co-workers, transaction partners, and customers, as well as ‘things or objects’ such as products, devices, and tools. Regarding ‘people’ dimension, we note that any occupational tasks cannot be performed without simple or complex interactions among people. Workers of an occupation may have to help others or serve the requests by others. They may have to exchange information with others or closely communicate with others in order to produce products or provide services. For some occupations, the interpersonal skills constitute the core essence of their job functions. For lawyers, persuasion and negotiation skills are the key components of different stages of legal procedures, not only for lawsuits in courts, but also for informal settlements outside courts (Heinz and Laumann, 1982). For sales representatives, explaining the functions of products to their customers, and instructing subordinates and reporting to their supervisors are essential parts of their jobs. With respect to ‘things’ dimension, workers often deal with simple to complex tools and machines. For a carpenter, being able to handle necessary tools comprises a core essence of his or her job performance. A scientist in a biology lab should know how to operate and manage lab equipment, and how to raise and maintain living organisms on a regular basis. Note that, although manual laborers need to communicate with their colleagues for simple instructions or procedural protocols, communication skills are less essential than their skill with tools or machines. However, a scientist working in a laboratory may be required to communicate with co-workers at very diverse, sophisticated, and complex levels while simultaneously holding high levels of skills to handle laboratory facilities. These aspects of skill assets have been largely neglected in stratification research since Cain and Treiman (1981)’s pioneering exploration of DOT (Dictionary of Occupational Titles) measures and a couple of subsequent investigations using such measures as ‘‘nurturant skill’’ (Kilbourne et al., 1994). In recent years, scholars have started to use the Occupational Information Network (O⁄NET) data (see Liu and Grusky, 2013; Kunovich, 2013a, 2013b). The previous studies on immigrants’ labor market experience have also paid little attention to the role of relational skills. The conventional approaches have mostly attributed migrants’ earnings deficit to the lack of human capital and the concentration of social capital within ethnic communities (Reitz, 2001; Aguilera and Massey, 2003; Waldinger and Lichter, 2003; Li, 2004, 2008; Cranford, 2005; Ness, 2005; Nakhaie, 2007). Departing from these preexisting views, our study argues that relational skills play an important role in shaping anti-immigrant sentiments through two mechanisms. First, relational skills will limit the supply of not only domestic labor-market competitors, but also immigrants or foreign workers who aspire to enter into or move up in the labor market. Subsequently, exposure to immigrants in a respective occupational labor market will affect the job qualities, wage levels, and the risk of unemployment for native workers (at least their perceptions of them), eventually shaping their attitudes toward immigrants. Second, relational skills required for occupational tasks tend to be correlated with ‘personality traits’ (Heckman and Kautz, 2012) that bring in ‘‘openness to (new) experiences,’’ ‘‘tendency to act in a cooperative unselfish manner,’’ and ‘‘(sympathetic) tender-mindedness’’ all of which may foster more favorable understanding of immigrants’ situations and their contributions to a host society. The following sections identify causal mechanisms between occupational skill assets and native workers’ attitudes toward immigrants. 1 The following sections on interpersonal and instrumental skills further elaborate on the definition and the concept of occupational skills regarding ‘‘people’’ and ‘‘tools’’ dimensions.

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2.1. Interpersonal skills and anti-immigrant sentiments We define interpersonal skills as a type of mental and physical practices that involve different levels and repertoires of interactions and communications among human beings, needed to develop temporary or prolonged relationships in diverse institutionalized work settings. Interpersonal skills range from mere ‘‘helping or serving’’ to more sophisticated skills, such as ‘‘mentoring (highest), negotiating, instructing, and supervising’’ (US Department of Labor, 1991). Therefore, interpersonal skills carry social skill components within them and some scholars call this ‘‘soft skills’’ as opposed to ‘‘formal or technical knowledge’’ (Moss and Tilly, 1996, 253). Each occupation requires workers to demonstrate ‘‘the ability to motivate cooperation in other actors’’ (Fligstein, 1997, 398) regarding its functional tasks. Employees in an occupation (or occupational field) should be able to ‘‘relate to the situation of the other,’’ where ‘‘others’’ include co-workers, transaction partners (suppliers and buyers), clients, and customers. They should be able to comprehend, and perform their roles and tasks based on ‘‘their interpersonal relations or on their orientations to each other or to shared goals’’ (Martin, 2003, 29). A large share of these skills partly originates from or is reinforced through formal educational training and on-the-job training (Becker, 1964), but also tends to be obtained through family background (Lareau, 2002) or neighborhood and friendship networks (Coleman, 1988). As an important part of non-cognitive skills (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, 2002; Bowles et al., 2001), interpersonal skills also include work habits, self-confidence, self-esteem, and calmness (Farkas, 2003). Interpersonal and communicative skills obtained in informal lifeworlds eventually develop into the skills needed for adequate performance in higher education and the workplace. This study assumes that there exist two primary venues by which native workers develop sentiments toward immigrants through interpersonal skills: (1) labor market competition and labor supply; and (2) ‘personality traits’ or ‘soft skills.’ First, interpersonal skills may function as skill barriers, discouraging immigrants from entering certain occupations or industries that formally or informally require highly sophisticated, culturally shaped skills, thereby shielding native workers from intense job competition. Interpersonal skills are generally less transferrable across different societies. Thus, immigrants’ lack of understanding of appropriate local norms, habits, conventions, routines, and practices may inhibit their adequate performance in particular job tasks that require highly nuanced skills for interpersonal interactions, and limit their chances of moving up to higher positions. With the presence of language barriers in certain occupations, language skills will also directly determine immigrants’ aspirations in local job markets (Portes et al., 1978).2 The second mechanism operates through ‘personality traits’ and ‘soft skills’ formed by ‘pre-labor market experiences’ and ‘on-the-job training.’ Those with higher levels of interpersonal skills are more likely to possess certain ‘personality traits’ that facilitate a better understanding of other people’s situations, and therefore give a ‘sympathetic support’ for immigrants even ‘before’ their entries into occupational worlds – primarily through earlier formal and informal educational experiences. After entering the workplace, workers with jobs requiring higher levels of interpersonal skills are more likely to be in situations dealing with other people’s interests and concerns or cooperating with others, both of which require a certain level of ‘trust’ of others and relatively unknown outsiders. Therefore, those who chose occupations requiring high levels of interpersonal skills will be more likely to develop more favorable views of immigrants.3 To summarize, interpersonal skills may not only serve as significant skill barriers against the immigrant labor force, but also capture certain ‘personality traits’ or ‘soft skills’ developed before or after entering the occupation. As a result, native workers in jobs that require high levels of interpersonal skills will be insulated from direct competitions against out-group members including immigrants, and also better able to understand the plight of immigrants. These theoretical expectations lead to the following hypotheses. Hypothesis 1-1. Occupations requiring high levels of interpersonal skills will have fewer immigrant workers.

Hypothesis 1-2. Workers with high levels of occupation-specific interpersonal skills (pj) will show less anti-immigrant sentiments. 2.2. Instrumental skills and anti-immigrant sentiments Instrumental skill standards capture skill requirements of each occupation in relation to tools, devices, machines, equipment, vehicles, and substance or raw materials. In contrast to interpersonal skill standards, instrumental skill standards do not carry social skill components. As it refers to workers’ ability to prepare, adjust, and control the operation of machines, tools, and materials on their job routines, it is impersonal, performance-oriented, and manual labor-related. The two venues through which interpersonal skills affect anti-immigrant sentiments may be also applicable to instrumental skills. First, the impersonal aspect of instrumental skill standards is likely to attract immigrant workers with or without high levels of instrumental skills, resulting in increased competition with native-born workers for jobs. Instrumental skill 2 Although it is unclear how much language skills and interpersonal skills shape each other, it is obvious that two skills are highly correlated with each other. We control for the effect of language skills through the variable, ‘‘cognitive skill complexity’’ in our analyses in Tables 2 and 3. 3 A reviewer pointed out that workers with higher interpersonal skills may be able to ‘‘better relate to the situation of others’’ and therefore those workers are less likely to develop anti-immigrant sentiments. We find our first mechanism (through ‘personality traits’) embraces this view.

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standards can be directly convertible across cultures and societies without any discounts. Therefore, even immigrant workers who initially lack these instrumental skills may be willing to invest in them, whereas it is difficult to obtain interpersonal skills over a comparably short time span. In this sense, we expect that native skilled manual workers with higher investments in instrumental skill assets, and concomitantly with higher incomes, will develop the strongest hostility toward immigrants as they are likely to lose more in the event that they are replaced by immigrants. Second, those with jobs requiring high levels of instrumental skills may be less likely to possess ‘soft skills’ or ‘personality traits’ (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; John and Srivastava, 1999) that enable a deeper understanding of others’ situations. Their initial entrance into jobs that require higher levels of instrumental rather than interpersonal skills may imply a lack of ‘personality traits’ that lead to sympathetic support for others. Furthermore, after entering the occupation, their isolated nature of work life may deprive their chance of developing these ‘personality traits.’ Thus, we expect that these ‘high-instrumental skill-workers’ will be more likely to develop negative feelings toward members of outgroups. In summary, native workers holding a high level of instrumental skill may not only have difficulty understanding of the plight of immigrants and others, but also confront fiercer competitions from immigrant workers with a similar level of skills but lower wage demands. Their lack of ‘soft skills’ or ‘personality traits’ as well as ‘perceived’ or ‘experienced’ vulnerability to competition with skilled immigrants in terms of high instrumental skills, ensuing downward pressures on their wages, and eventually higher risk of unemployment, lead them to develop stronger anti-immigrant sentiments.4 Based on the preceding discussion, we predict as follows: Hypothesis 2-1. Occupations requiring high levels of instrumental skills will have more immigrant workers.

Hypothesis 2-2. Workers with high levels of occupation-specific instrumental skills (tj) will show more anti-immigrant sentiments. 2.3. Relational skill specificity and anti-immigrant sentiment: two dilemmas Two types of aforementioned skill sets, interpersonal skills necessary for human interaction on job tasks and instrumental skills required for dealing with things and objects on job routines and practices, constitute a notion of occupation-specific relational skill specificity.5 The relative composition of the two types of skills captures the degree to which a worker possesses interpersonal skill assets relative to the total skill assets (the sum of interpersonal and instrumental skill assets). In our framework, the relational skill specificity, pj/(tj + pj),6 reflects two aspects. First, the higher the proportion of pj is, the less culturally convertible the entire skill set of a particular occupation will be. Therefore, native workers in occupations with higher interpersonal skill requirements will be more insulated from competition with immigrants. Second, the higher the proportion of pj is, the greater the chance that a member of a particular occupation will have ‘personality traits’ and ‘soft skills’ that enable a better understanding others’ situation and their contribution to the society. In other words, this study assumes that this notion of relational skill specificity is likely to capture not only native workers’ capacity to understand outgroup members but also the degree of exposure to competition with immigrant workers, which depends on the transferability of skill assets across different cultures and societies. Therefore, native workers in occupations requiring a higher possession of interpersonal skills in their total skill sets may be in dualistic situations. On one hand, they may be inclined to embrace immigrants based on their soft, communicative skills, while they are also protected from competitions with immigrants by skill barrier mechanisms based on the low convertibility of interpersonal skills. The first characteristic leads them to support and favor the presence of more immigrants, but the second characteristic shows that they are already economically sheltered from intense competitions. However, workers in occupations requiring a lower possession of interpersonal skills relative to instrumental skills may face an opposite situation. They are less likely to possess ‘personality traits’ that develop empathy for outgroup members, while the lower level of interpersonal skills requirement will facilitate the movements of workers across borders due to the lack of social skill barriers. Therefore, incumbent native workers in this type of jobs will have to tolerate the high perceived risk of downward wage pressure and unemployment. We argue that two mechanisms, lack of ‘soft skills’ or related ‘personality traits,’ and intensified competition, may reinforce each other and end up producing stronger anti-immigrant sentiments among native workers with a higher possession of instrumental skills over interpersonal skills. 4 We have a measure of ‘the proportion of foreign-born workers/immigrants in each occupation’ imported from the Current Population Survey March 2000 data, which allows us to test the ‘labor market competition/labor supply’ causal venue, but do not have a direct measure of the ‘pre- and post-labor market training’ mechanisms through ‘personality traits’ or ‘soft skills.’ In actual analyses, therefore, we will introduce our relational skill measures along with ‘the proportion of immigrants in each occupation’ variable, and then surmise that the remaining significant effects of relation skill measures will reflect the ‘personality traits’ aspects. 5 We develop this ‘relational skill specificity’ as a summary measure of two dimensions of relational skills, and aim to introduce it in a regression equation as a single measure (as introducing both interpersonal and instrumental skills causes a collinearity problem due to a relatively high correlation between them). 6 The formula was directly borrowed from Iversen and Soskice (2001)’ skill asset specificity, s/(g + s), in which s denotes firm-specific skills, while g represents general skills that are transferable across firms. For discussion on occupation or industry-specific skills (beyond firm-specific skills), see Mares (2003), Neal (1995, 2000), and Acemoglu and Pischke (1999)’s works.

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Hypothesis 3-1. Occupations with a higher possession of interpersonal skills over the entire skill assets have a lower level of influx of immigrants. Hypothesis 3-2. Workers employed in jobs requiring a greater possession of interpersonal skills over the entire skill assets will show lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiments. Fig. 1 summarizes the causal flows between relational skill specificity and anti-immigrant sentiment. Relational skill specificity affects natives’ attitudes toward immigrants directly (A), but also indirectly through the percentage of foreign-born in an occupation (A-1 and A-2). The goal of this paper is to test these two channels: direct and indirect pathways of relational skills on anti-immigrant attitudes. In the direct causal path (A), we assume that a high level of relational skill specificity in one’s occupation will lead to a lower level of anti-immigrant sentiments. For instance, those with high levels of interpersonal skills may be better able to understand other people’s situation or those who succeed in building interpersonal skills may intrinsically have higher levels of sympathy or empathy of others. In the indirect causal flows, low or high relational skill specificity for an occupation will affect the percentage of foreign-born workers in that occupation (A-1). The extent of exposure to foreign-born workers in one’s occupation will induce incumbent native workers to develop high or low anti-immigrant sentiment (A-2). 3. Data and measures 3.1. Anti-immigrant sentiment This study tests the proposed hypotheses, using a module of the General Social Survey (2004) on national identity and citizenship.7 Using four questions on respondents’ attitudes toward immigrations, this study constructs a composite, weighted average index of ‘anti-immigrant sentiments’ based on the factor loadings identified by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The question used to construct the composite index is: ‘‘there are different opinions about immigrants from other countries living in America (By ‘‘immigrants’’ we mean people who come to settle in America). How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?’’ The question subsequently display the following four statements: (Y1) Immigrants are generally good for the economy; (Y2) Immigrants take jobs away from people who were born in America; (Y3) Immigrants improve American society by bringing in new ideas and cultures; and (Y4) Immigrants increase crime rates.8 The response categories follow the Likert scale: (1) strongly agree; (2) agree; (3) neither agree nor disagree; (4) disagree; (5) strongly disagree. The four questions deal with respondents’ sentiments of immigrants regarding the general economy, employment/unemployment, cognitive/cultural diversity, and everyday security, respectively.9 In constructing the composite index, response categories are rescaled to assign higher scores to stronger sentiments against immigrants. 3.2. Interpersonal and instrumental skill standards In order to measure relational aspects of skill requirements for each occupation, we matched the occupation variable in the GSS 2004 module with the DOT (Dictionary of Occupational Titles) (U.S. Department of Labor, Employment, and Training Administration, 1991) classification system of occupational categories. The former based on the ISCO 88 (the International Standard Classification of Occupations) contains about 400 occupational categories. We link these 400 occupations with the DOT’s more detailed occupational groups. Through this matching process, we were able to import seven DOT measures of occupational skill requirements. Among them, two DOT measures, a job’s relationships to people and things, are used to capture relational skill assets. First, a job’s functional requirement in relation to people (pj), interpersonal skill requirement, is based on the following hierarchical ordering of interactive, communicative relationships among people: taking instructions-helping (1), serving (2), speaking-signaling (3), persuading (4), diverting (5), supervising (6), instructing (7), negotiating (8), and mentoring (9). Second, a job’s skill requirements for dealing with things (tj) are based on the following ordering: handling (1), feeding-offbearing (2), tending (3), manipulating (4), driving-operating (5), operating-controlling (6), precision working (7), and setting up (8).10 Both measures are reverse-ordered from the original scale to denote higher skill 7 Currently, the GSS 2004 data is the most recent dataset in the U.S. with detailed information on native workers’ attitudes toward immigrants and their occupations. 8 Most studies using GSS (or ISSP, International Social Survey Programme) use another question, ‘‘Do you think the number of immigrants to [country] nowadays should be. . . 1. Increased a lot; 2. Increased a little; 3. Remain the same; 4. Reduced a little; 5. Reduced a lot. I find this question does not necessarily measure how respondents feel about immigrants in different areas of socio-economic matters. The question captures the degree to which respondents consider the current and future numerical immigration level appropriate for the society. It is completely possible to answer ‘‘remain the same’’ for this question, while being strongly positive or negative about the presence of immigrants. 9 The four questions load on one factor in exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis using STATA 12 gives the following factor loading estimates: 1.000 for general economy (Y1); 1.034 for employment/unemployment (Y2); 1.048 for ideas/cultures (Y3); 1.073 for crime (Y4). Overall model fit measures are satisfactory, when judged based on Bollen (1989)’s recommendations, with the exception of RMSEA (p-value < 0.000; IFI = .976; NFI = .975; TLI = .929; RMSEA = 0.113). The final composite score was calculated as: Anti-immigrant Sentiment Composite Score = (1.000⁄Y1 + 1.002⁄Y2 + .914⁄Y3 + .842⁄Y4)/4. In addition, we also tested the simple sum of four raw scores, which achieves a fairly high level of reliability (Cronbach’s a reliability coefficient = 0.78) and produces the same results. 10 Detailed definitions and explanations of each stage are in Appendix B.

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Beer able to relate to others’ situaons (due to “so skills” or “personality traits”) Causal Flow A

Relaonal Skill Specificity in Occupaon

An-Immigrant Senment

A-1

A-2

Percentage of ForeignBorn in Occupaon

Fig. 1. Causal mechanism: the effect of relational skill specificity on anti-immigrant sentiment.

requirements for higher values.11 These 1 to 9 and 1 to 8 ordered categories are directly used as scores for interpersonal skill asset and instrumental skill asset.12 3.3. Relational skill specificity Then we constructed a measure of relational skill specificity with these two skill requirements at the occupational level. The measurement scheme of this relational skill specificity is inspired by Iversen and Soskice’s work and their ‘‘Varieties of Capitalism school’’ (VoC hereafter) approach (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Iversen and Soskice, 2001). They have recently highlighted the role of workers’ skill asset portability/specificity across firms in explaining demands for social protection. The VoC literature claims that workers who have invested in firm-specific skills relative to general skills are more likely to support the public provision of social welfare, because they are exposed to greater risk of unemployment and income loss due to their low transportability of skill assets across firms (Iversen and Soskice, 2001). Based on this logic, we expand the notion of skill specificity ‘across firms’ to skill specificity ‘across national borders and cultures.’ Relational skill specificity is measured as the ratio, pj/(tj + pj), in which a respondent’s job’s interpersonal skill requirement divided by her job’s total relational skill requirements (the sum of instrumental skill requirement and interpersonal skill requirement). It measures the necessary amount of interpersonal skills per one unit of total relational skills to demonstrate an adequate execution of tasks specific to an occupation. 3.4. Percentage of foreign-born in respondent’s occupational category13 In order to ascertain the relationship between relational skill specificity and anti-immigrant sentiments, we introduce the percentage of foreign-born in one’s occupational category as a dependent variable and a control. First, we test whether high or low levels of relational skill specificity in occupations have an effect on the actual percentage of foreign-born workers in these occupations. Secondly, we use the percentage of foreign-born workers in each occupational category to assess the indirect effect of relational skill specificity on attitudes toward immigrants. Previous research by Kunovich (2013a, 2013b) also employs the percent of Mexicans and immigrants in occupations to investigate the impact of labor market competition on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies by using O⁄NET and GSS 2004 data. His findings show that the effect of ‘‘percent of Mexican in occupation’’ on anti-immigrant attitudes is largely spurious, and is mostly due to the fact that occupations with high percentage of Mexicans tend to have workers with less education who are also more likely to perceive threat. Our analysis differs from these previous studies in two important ways. First, our main focus is on examining both direct and indirect effects of occupational skills (e.g. ‘‘relational skill specificity’’) on anti-immigrant sentiments. Thus, we use the variable ‘‘percentage of foreign-born in one’s occupation’’ to test the indirect effect of relational skill specificity, i.e. exposure to competition with foreign-born workers within occupations. Second, we use regression (OLS) models with Huber–White 11 Another dimension of relational skill requirements contained in the DOT is ‘skill requirement in relation to data.’ This measure, based on factor analysis, turns out to be more related to ‘cognitive skill dimension’ (Kilbourne et al., 1994). Therefore, it is included as a component of ‘cognitive skill complexity.’ 12 Obviously, we assume that ordinal scales may be treated as interval. Previous studies report that this treatment does not involve too much distortion (Labovitz, 1970; Kim, 1975). 13 A reviewer has suggested that ‘‘the effect of interpersonal skill requirements on anti-immigrant attitudes [may be] purely a function of their lack of exposure to immigrant worker threat’’ and that it is imperative to control for the percentage of foreign-born workers in respondent’s occupational category in order to assess the true effect of one’s level of relational skills on anti-immigrant sentiments. Therefore, we calculated the percentage of foreign-born in each occupational category (ISCO 88) from the Current Population Survey March 2000 data and included it in our analysis.

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robust standard errors instead of HLM models. As Kunovich (2013a) has found that individual-level variables explain much of the variance in attitudes toward immigrants, we focus on estimating the effects of individual-level variables. In this paper, we assess the detailed skill requirements on occupations through the DOT measures. We calculate the percentage of foreign-born in each occupational category (ISCO 88) from the Current Population Survey (CPS) March 2000 data and merge with the General Social Survey (2004) data.14 Thus, for each job category (ISCO 88) in the General Social Survey 2004 module, we provide the percentage of foreign-born workers in that specific occupation. 3.5. Other control variables 3.5.1. Formal education Formal education captures the individual-level human capital component (Becker, 1964), and has been the most significant factor in explaining attitudes toward out-groups in previous studies (Quillian, 1995; Mayda, 2006; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010). Highly educated individuals are more tolerant of the presence of ethnic or racial minorities, including immigrants, in the neighborhood and national economies. Formal education is measured as ‘‘the highest year of school completed’’ for each respondent. 3.5.2. Cognitive skill complexity In line with previous stratification research, this study includes occupation-specific cognitive skill complexity (Kilbourne et al., 1994; Weeden, 2002) as one of the control variables. Following the previous studies (Kilbourne et al., 1994; Farkas et al., 1997), we use five DOT measures as components of this cognitive skill complexity: three components of general educational development in reasoning, math, and language (R, M, and L, respectively in Appendix A.2); specific vocational training requirements (S); and skill requirement in relation to data (D).15 With the inclusion of the language-skill requirement in the composite measure, interpersonal skill standards are expected to capture only the effects of non-cognitive social skill elements on anti-immigrant sentiments. 3.5.3. Religious affiliations In our attempt to control for the effects of religion on anti-immigrant sentiments, we consider not only denomination but also cultural conflicts between orthodox/conservative Protestants and mainline/liberal Protestants. We assume that cultural differences originating from respondents’ religious faiths (Hunter, 1994; Wuthnow, 1996) may shape their attitudes toward immigrants in different ways. On one hand, conservative Protestants, who tend to have a strong belief in the literal inerrancy of the Bible and an uncompromising moral view based on it, may consider the greater presence of immigrants with different cultural and religious backgrounds as serious ‘threats’ to their (uncompromising) religious doctrines and communities. They are more likely to presume that immigrants might disrupt their traditional fabrics of religious and cultural communities, not only by increasing crime and job loss, but also by bringing different cultural and religious ideas and practices along with them. Therefore, conservative Protestants’ low tolerance for different religious and cultural practices is more likely to lead to greater anti-immigrant sentiment. On the other hand, liberal Protestants may think that moral views and religious doctrines can be compromised and updated along with changing community norms (Hunter, 1991), which may lead to higher level of openness to immigrants’ presence and their values. Overall, we assume that, as both liberal Protestants and Catholics are composed of very heterogeneous groups, their overall differences in opinions toward immigrants from non-religious populations may not be noticeable. Three indicator (0 or 1) variables for religious affiliation, conservative Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics, are introduced with the reference category being ‘no or other religions’. 3.5.4. Race We expect that racial differences may exist in attitudes towards immigrants due to the racialization of immigration since the 1960s. Three categories of individual racial identification, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and others are introduced. We use three indicator (0 or 1) variables to compare group differences in attitudes toward immigrants with Latinos, the reference category. 3.5.5. Political affiliation Many social scientists have recently highlighted the effect of political affiliation on anti-immigrant sentiments especially in advanced industrial countries (Semyonov et al., 2006), as (extremist) right-wing parties often resort to stirring up xenophobic fear of foreigners to consolidate their electoral base. In this study, we control for political party identity by introducing an indicator variable (0 or 1) for Republican Party membership. Although some segments of Republicans may show 14 We deleted one occupational category (e.g. postmasters) in the General Social Survey (2004) data as this did not exist in the Current Population Survey March 2000 data. Thus, the total number of occupational categories (ISCO 88) in the General Social Survey (2004) data changed from 161 to 160. 15 We also conducted confirmatory factor analyses of five measures and identified appropriate factor loadings for these sub-indicators; 1.000 for reasoning, 1.063 for math, 1.112 for language, 1.438 for relation to data, 1.670 for specific vocational training (SVP). Fit statistics are as follows: p-value < 0.000; IFI = .987; NFI = .986; TLI = .973; RMSEA = 0.133).

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stronger feelings against immigrants, others may not. Especially controlling for fundamentalist Protestants, we do not expect that republican membership will have statistically meaningful positive effects on anti-immigrant sentiments. 3.5.6. Other individual-level demographic variables Sex is introduced as a component of the baseline model with an indicator (0 for men and 1 for women) variable, with the expectation that men will show greater hostility toward out-group populations. With the expectation that older people are expected to show more prejudice about out-group populations, age variable is also added as one of the controls. A group of dummy variables are also introduced to control for individuals’ labor-market status: part-time employed, unemployed, retired and non-employed (students, housewives, and disabled) are controlled for, with full-time employed being the reference category. Weaker status in the labor market is expected to be associated with stronger anti-immigrant sentiments. We control for union membership to see if workers’ memberships with unions lead them to show stronger anti-immigrant sentiments, by using an indicator (0 or 1) variable for being a member of a union. Finally, we control for respondents’ citizenship status. Respondents with citizenship are expected to show stronger anti-immigrant sentiments, compared to those without citizenship, mostly, immigrants.16 Obviously, there will be an unknown number of citizens who have recent immigration histories but also obtained citizenships after decades of residential histories. We assume that this segment of the population is likely to have similar attitudes toward the recent immigrants similar to those of native-born citizens, after having experienced a significant process of assimilation.17 4. Method We employ a linear regression (OLS) model using Huber–White heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors (or robust standard errors) for 160 occupational-level clusters, adjusting for within-cluster correlations. In this model, we assume that respondents may be clustered into occupations and that observations may be correlated within each occupation, but would be independent between occupational categories (Huber, 1967; White, 1980). In other words, the model allows ‘‘off-diagonal elements (in the error term) from the same cluster to be non-zero,’’ while still maintaining the assumption that there is ‘‘no correlation among observations across clusters’’ (Primo et al., 2007; 451). One may employ hierarchical linear modeling (HLM; Bryk and Raudenbush, 1992; Raudenbush and Bryk, 2002) to take into account this kind of error structure, but we choose to employ the Huber–White estimator for the following two reasons: first, we are not interested in decomposing (explained) variances into each level to know how much each level (of covariates) explains, which is the main concern of the HLM models. What we want to know in this study is simply the point estimation of our main covariates and their statistical significance, with an appropriately specified error structure; second, the Huber–White estimator is computationally less intensive, as it does not require distributional assumptions for every level (Primo et al., 2007), which may impose ‘‘heavy demands on theory and data’’ (Steenbergen and Jones, 2002, 234).18 5. Results 5.1. Descriptive results Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the main variables including measures of relational and cognitive skill assets for eight major occupational categories. The mean value of anti-immigrant sentiments is the highest for skilled machine operators (2.99) and skilled craftsmen (2.93), while the lowest for professionals (2.35) and managers (2.53). Note that the elementary unskilled, those who are at the lowest (cognitive) skill level, do not show the highest level of anti-immigrant sentiment (2.80). The skilled craftsmen and machine operators, representative of manual working class occupations, have one of the lowest interpersonal skill standards (1.76 and 2.01), and the highest instrumental skill standard (6.56 and 6.23), thereby showing the lowest relational skill specificity (.21 and .25). These descriptive statistics aggregated by large occupational categories suggest that there may be a meaningfully strong negative association between relational skill specificity and anti-immigrant sentiment, which may also coincide with variations along occupational lines. 5.2. Multivariate results Table 2 displays the unstandardized coefficients from linear regression models testing the effects of relational skill specificity, interpersonal skills, and instrumental skills on the percentage of foreign-born in occupations. Our findings show that 16 As citizens with one or two immigrant parents (the second generation immigrants who hold citizenships) are more likely to support immigrants’ presence, we alternatively tested both parents’ citizenship status instead of respondents’ citizenship status, expecting that individuals whose parents are both citizens, will show stronger anti-immigrant sentiments, when compared to those with at least one parent without citizenship status. The results were largely similar to the ones using simple citizenship. The results are available upon request. 17 We tested whether the exclusion of this group with recent immigration histories from the sample affects the estimates of the relational skill measures. The results for this smaller sample (N = 929) are largely identical with the ones reported in the text. The results are available upon request. 18 Actually, some of the models using cross-levels and interactions did not converge under the MLE (maximum likelihood estimation). Nevertheless, we also tested some basic multi-level models treating the occupation-level as a higher level (but not specifying varying slopes across units), which is equivalent to our current models. The results were almost identical. Please see Appendix C.2 for the results using HLM models with 47 occupational groups.

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Table 1 Descriptive statistics of key variables, by major occupational categories (ISCO 88): General Social Survey, 2004. Occupational Categories

Officials/Managers Professionals Technicians Clerks Service/Sales Workers Skilled Craftsmen & Agricultural and Fishery Machine Operators Elementary Unskilled

N

176 223 126 146 129 100 81 69

Anti-immigrant sentiments

Cognitive skill complexity

Interpersonal skill standard

Instrumental skill standard

Relational skill specificity

Mean

Std dev.

Mean

Std dev.

Mean

Std dev.

Mean

Std dev.

Mean

Std dev.

2.51 2.35 2.63 2.76 2.78 2.94 2.98 2.81

0.64 0.72 0.81 0.64 0.78 0.75 0.84 0.78

7.05 7.47 6.43 4.29 3.60 5.48 4.18 1.75

0.32 0.61 0.58 0.82 1.20 0.85 1.16 0.32

8.00 5.35 3.51 2.16 2.47 1.78 2.01 1.46

0.00 2.46 1.51 0.99 0.91 0.98 1.01 0.83

1.00 3.17 2.96 5.62 2.55 6.58 6.25 1.00

0.00 2.71 2.67 1.32 2.06 1.20 1.44 0.00

0.89 0.65 0.60 0.28 0.54 0.21 0.25 0.56

0.00 0.25 0.24 0.11 0.19 0.09 0.12 0.10

Table 2 Regression results of the percentage of foreign-born in occupation against relational skill specificity, interpersonal skills, and instrumental skills in occupation.

Relational skill specificity in occupation

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

6.719** (0.927)

7.264** (0.899)

6.656** (0.923)

Interpersonal skill in occupation

Model 4

Model 5

0.779** (0.111)

0.700** (0.115)

Instrumental skill in occupation Cognitive skill complexity in occupation Avg. years of education in occupation Avg. log income in occupation Avg. union membership in occupation Avg.% of unemployed in occupation Constant N R2

1.198** (0.179) 0.455* (0.194) 0.351 (0.505) 1.790 (1.693) 2.526 (2.495)

1.404** (0.157)

0.036 (0.478) 2.197 (1.688) 2.877 (2.496)

25.54** (4.321) 1076 0.212

24.53** (4.308) 1076 0.208

1.161** (0.171) 0.411* (0.184)

1.082** (0.173)

1.644 (1.680) 2.489 (2.494)

0.233 (0.479) 2.578 (1.706) 3.198 (2.513)

28.21** (1.971) 1076 0.212

23.87** (4.367) 1076 0.197

0.875** (0.181) 0.468* (0.185)

Model 6

Model 7

0.707** (0.089) 1.719** (0.156)

0.653** (0.090) 1.416** 0.493** (0.180)

2.005 (1.699) 2.776 (2.510)

0.156 (0.476) 1.561 (1.686) 1.946 (2.505)

1.015 (1.675) 1.560 (2.499)

26.59** (2.056) 1076 0.201

21.11** (4.392) 1076 0.207

24.92** (2.087) 1076 0.212

Robust standard errors in parentheses. Significant at 10%. * Significant at 5%. ** Significant at 1%.

+

Hypothesis 1-1, 2-1, and 3-1 hold across different model specifications. Occupations with higher levels of relational skill specificity and interpersonal skill requirements are more likely to have a lower percentage of foreign-born workers in the occupation, controlling for cognitive skill complexity, average years of schooling, average log income, average percentage of union membership, and average level of unemployment in each occupation.19 In contrast, occupations with higher instrumental skill standards are more likely to have a higher concentration of foreign-born workers in the occupation, ceteris paribus. Thus, interpersonal skill standards may function as ‘‘skill barriers’’ limiting the entry of immigrant workers to certain occupations. Table 3 presents unstandardized coefficients from linear regression models with Huber–White standard errors testing the effects of measures of relational skills on anti-immigrant sentiments. Model 1 reveals that interpersonal skill asset has an expected, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiment, in the presence of other individual-level covariates (Hypothesis 1-2). Interpersonal skills may facilitate a greater understanding of others through ‘personality traits’ and also operate as a skill barrier, insulating native workers from competition with immigrants. Model 2 shows that instrumental skill assets has a strong positive effect on anti-immigrant sentiment (Hypothesis 2-2).We predicted that workers with higher levels of instrumental skill may not only lack ‘soft skills’ or relevant ‘personality traits,’ but also feel more vulnerable to the risk of unemployment and income loss, leading to strong anti-immigrant sentiments. In Model 3, we test the effect of our main variable, ‘relational skill specificity,’ on anti-immigrant sentiment, adjusting for all individual-level baseline controls. As we predicted, the coefficient is negative and highly significant. The result also lends 19 Average years of schooling in occupation and average log income in occupation are highly correlated (r = .64), and, therefore are not included in the same model except for Model 1.

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N. Lee, C.-S. Lee / Social Science Research 52 (2015) 270–289 Table 3 Regression results of anti-immigrant sentiments against relational skill specificity (using Huber–White robust standard errors).

Sex (Female = 1) Age Education Part-time Employed Unemployed Retired Non-employed Fundamental Protestant Mainline Protestant Catholic Non-Hispanic White Non-Hispanic Black Other (Non-Hispanic) Citizenship Republican Union Membership Interpersonal Skill

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

0.048 (0.043) 0.004* (0.002) 0.083** (0.008) 0.009 (0.066) 0.065 (0.095) 0.020 (0.075) 0.057 (0.071) 0.158** (0.058) 0.137* (0.065) 0.084 (0.067) 0.512** (0.085) 0.501** (0.093) 0.004 (0.112) 0.463** (0.122) 0.022 (0.048) 0.054 (0.083) 0.024** (0.007)

0.048 (0.043) 0.004* (0.002) 0.089** (0.008) 0.013 (0.065) 0.065 (0.094) 0.006 (0.076) 0.074 (0.071) 0.150* (0.059) 0.131* (0.064) 0.084 (0.068) 0.517** (0.085) 0.509** (0.094) 0.013 (0.107) 0.486** (0.117) 0.034 (0.047) 0.070 (0.082)

0.046 (0.043) 0.004* (0.002) 0.083** (0.008) 0.003 (0.066) 0.066 (0.093) 0.013 (0.076) 0.069 (0.071) 0.152** (0.058) 0.135* (0.064) 0.083 (0.068) 0.512** (0.084) 0.500** (0.092) 0.007 (0.109) 0.484** (0.119) 0.033 (0.047) 0.059 (0.082)

0.041 (0.042) 0.004* (0.002) 0.080** (0.008) 0.004 (0.067) 0.064 (0.093) 0.013 (0.078) 0.065 (0.071) 0.154** (0.058) 0.135* (0.064) 0.082 (0.067) 0.512** (0.084) 0.494** (0.093) 0.003 (0.109) 0.487** (0.118) 0.035 (0.046) 0.059 (0.082)

0.316** (0.077)

0.288** (0.088) 0.006 (0.014) 0.228 (0.298)

3.159** (0.138) 0.189

3.100** (0.146) 0.190

0.029** (0.008)

Instrumental Skill Relational Skill Specificity Cognitive Skill Complexity % Foreign-born in R’s Occupation Constant R2

3.104** (0.141) 0.182

2.975** (0.153) 0.187

N = 1055; Robust standard errors in parentheses. Significant at 10%. * Significant at 5%. ** Significant at 1%.

+

credibility to the central argument (Hypothesis 3-2) of this study that a greater possession of interpersonal skills relative to instrumental skills will lead to lower anti-immigrant sentiments. Model 4 tests whether the significant effect of relational skill specificity remains robust against the percentage of foreign-born in respondent’s occupation and cognitive skill complexity.20 Relational skill specificity is again highly significant at the 1% level (b = .288). With the introduction of additional variables, the effect of relational skill specificity has decreased moderately from Model 3 (b = .316), which implies that a part

20 In Appendix C.1, we separately test the effect of exposure to foreign-born workers in 160 occupations on anti-immigrant sentiments. In Model 1, without relational skill specificity, the percentage of foreign-born in one’s occupation has a significant positive effect on anti-immigrant attitudes at the 10% level. This positive effect disappears once relational skill specificity is introduced in Model 2. In Models 3–4, we combined adjacent occupations into ISCO 88’s 28 larger occupational categories. In Model 3, the percentage of foreign-born in one’s broader occupational category has a significant, positive effect on anti-immigrant feelings at the 5% level, but this effect becomes non-significant in Model 4 after adding relational skill specificity. Appendix C.2 shows the result from HLM models using 47 occupational groups. To collapse 160 occupations into 47 larger categories, we split the 28 larger occupational categories (especially those with more than 50 incumbents) and combined occupations in the similar category (according to ISCO88 categorization). In Model 1, the percentage of foreign-born workers in occupations has a significant positive effect on anti-immigrant sentiment at the 5% level. However, this significant effect disappears once relational skill specificity is introduced.

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of relational skill specificity effects may have been mediated through exposure to foreign-born workers and cognitive skill complexity in one’s occupation (but the effect is non-significant).21 The finding shows that the effect of relational skill specificity outweighs that of cognitive skill assets and the percentage of foreign-born in one’s occupation, both of which do not have significant effects on anti-immigrant feelings. Based on these results, we conclude that ‘personality traits’ mechanism prevails over ‘labor market competition’ mechanism.22 Model 3 and 4 show the effects of the baseline control variables on anti-immigrant sentiment. Respondents’ sex and labor-market status variables are not associated with anti-immigrant sentiment. Conservative Protestants are more likely to have negative feelings towards immigrants, compared to other religious adherents, which supports the argument that they will be less tolerant of out-groups’ different cultural and religious identities. Surprisingly, contrary to our prediction, mainline Protestants are also more likely to exhibit stronger sentiments against immigrants, compared to those with no or other religious affiliations. The strong anti-immigrant sentiments held by mainline Protestants may imply the division between the laity and the progressive clergy (Wuthnow, 1996). While the leadership of mainline Protestants may be progressive and pro-immigrant, the followers may not exactly share the same views towards immigrants. Non-Hispanic white respondents hold more negative views towards immigrants, compared to Latino respondents. Interestingly, non-Hispanic black respondents also show anti-immigrant sentiments as strong as white respondents. This result suggests that black respondents consider themselves as incumbent majority-native insiders threatened by immigrants, rather than a part of minority groups, especially regarding the immigration issue. African-Americans’ stronger anti-immigrant sentiment may be also attributable to their higher (perceived) group-level threats that originate from their intense competition with immigrants in low-wage job markets. In addition, African-Americans may have a lower proportion of (recent) immigrants than Latinos, the omitted category, which also means that their friends and relatives are less likely to be immigrants. Therefore, non-Hispanic blacks’ lower chances of ‘‘contact’’ (Pettigrew, 1998) with immigrants inside their own group are likely to lead to stronger anti-immigrant sentiments. As expected, the effect of education has a highly significant, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiment. This variable is the single most dominant predictor of attitudes toward immigrants. The result simply signifies that the more educated an individual is, the less threatened or less prejudiced one is likely to be. The more educated are supportive of the presence of immigrants, because they have had the chance to absorb more valuable sources of information regarding immigrants’ positive roles in industry and society. Respondents who are legal citizens are likely to have stronger anti-immigrant sentiments, compared to those without citizenship, as they may perceive themselves more as ‘insiders’ against immigrants. Contrary to our expectations, older people are less likely to exhibit negative attitudes toward immigrants, net of economic self-interest. Being a Republican or a union member does not have a statistically significant effect on anti-immigrant sentiment. The non-significant effect of Republican Party membership is not surprising as mixed attitudes toward immigrants often coexist within the same political party. Unions’ stances on immigration also vary by industries, and thus it may be difficult to find a consistent relationship between union membership and sentiments toward immigrants. The result overall offers sufficient support to our argument. Workers possessing greater interpersonal skills relative to instrumental skills are more likely to possess ‘soft skills’ or ‘personality traits’ that enhance their capacity to relate to the situation of others, and also less likely to suffer from fierce competitions with immigrants (thanks to relatively high interpersonal skill barriers). Therefore, workers with higher relational skill specificity are less likely to express strong anti-immigrant sentiments. However, the fact that relational skill specificity is still highly significant, after controlling for the percentage of foreign-born in one’s occupation (which has a non-significant effect), implies that the direct effect of relational skill specificity outweighs the indirect effect. In short, we conclude that the direct pathway through ‘personality traits’ prevails over the indirect pathway through the exposure to competition with immigrants in occupations. Table 4 shows the results from ordered logit models for four separate dependent variables. In order to find out whether results differ by each question, we analyzed the four outcome variables separately using random intercept proportional odds models. There are no significant differences in results between using the composite-index and using the individual outcomes. Relational skill specificity has a significant, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiments across three models (a = .01 level), except for the question, ‘‘immigrants are good for economy,’’ where it is only marginally significant at the 10% level. We also find that, contrary to our prediction, fundamentalist Protestants focus more on the economic aspect of immigration while mainline Protestants express concern on the cultural aspect of immigration. Conservative Protestants are more likely to think that immigrants are not good for the economy (a = .01 level), and that immigrants take jobs away from natives (a = .05 level), compared to those with other religious beliefs. On the other hand, they are only marginally more likely to view that immigrants improve society by bringing new ideas (a = .10 level). Mainline Protestants, in contrast, are less likely to think that immigrants improve society by bringing in new ideas (a = .01 level), and marginally more likely to think that immigrants increase crime (a = .10 level).

21 Following Reviewer’s suggestion, we ran structural equation models (SEM) and Sobel tests. Both results show that the indirect effect of relational skill specificity through the percentage of foreign-born in occupations is not significant. 22 As we do not have concrete measures of ‘personality traits’ other than interpersonal and instrumental skills, we do not know exactly how much variations are attributable to one or the other mechanism between ‘personality traits’ and ‘labor market competition.’ Personality traits effects may have absorbed labor market competition effects, or there may, indeed, be no labor market competition effect. At this point, the SEM result lends credence to the latter scenario.

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Table 4 Regression results from multi-level ordered logit models of four separate areas of anti-immigrant sentiments against relational skill assets (using Huber–White robust standard errors). Immigrants Increase Crimea Sex (Female = 1) Age Education Part-time Employed Unemployed Retired Non-employed Fundamentalist Protestant Mainline Protestant Catholic Non-Hispanic White Non-Hispanic Black Other (non-Hispanic) Citizenship Republican Union Membership

Cut1

Relational Skill Specificity Constant

Cut2

Constant

Cut3

Constant

Cut4

Constant Log pseudo likelihood

0.294* (0.125) 0.002 (0.005) 0.141** (0.024) 0.033 (0.151) 0.084 (0.229) 0.234 (0.214) 0.098 (0.162) 0.150 (0.141) 0.332+ (0.176) 0.231 (0.164) 0.514* (0.236) 0.303 (0.273) 0.326 (0.344) 0.105 (0.359) 0.136 (0.127) 0.180 (0.240) 0.703** (0.223) 4.488** (0.613) 2.107** (0.591) 0.763 (0.587) 0.843 (0.574) 1461.76

Immigrants Good for Economy

Immigrants Take Jobs Awaya

0.136 (0.112) 0.020** (0.005) 0.156** (0.024) 0.065 (0.173) 0.340 (0.225) 0.103 (0.197) 0.063 (0.172) 0.397** (0.154) 0.179 (0.176) 0.235 (0.184) 1.209** (0.237) 1.213** (0.268) 0.019 (0.354) 1.571** (0.387) 0.029 (0.143) 0.145 (0.189) 0.404+ (0.212) 3.322** (0.547) 0.606 (0.481) 0.869+ (0.486) 2.855** (0.514) 1365.44

0.131 (0.119) 0.008* (0.0042) 0.182** (0.025) 0.203 (0.168) 0.326 (0.246) 0.017 (0.226) 0.270 (0.210) 0.341* (0.147) 0.202 (0.169) 0.007 (0.171) 1.245** (0.229) 1.362** (0.262) 0.352 (0.381) 1.424** (0.322) 0.085 (0.122) 0.066 (0.228) 0.642** (0.184) 3.686** (0.435) 1.400** (0.421) 0.346 (0.431) 1.496** (0.435) 1476.91

Immigrants Improve Society/New Ideas 0.037 (0.108) 0.006 (0.005) 0.198** (0.023) 0.108 (0.155) 0.044 (0.234) 0.301 (0.206) 0.121 (0.178) 0.290+ (0.165) 0.466** (0.178) 0.279 (0.185) 0.989** (0.258) 1.151** (0.311) 0.10 (0.435) 1.028* (0.478) 0.299* (0.126) 0.059 (0.205) 0.746** (0.229) 3.611** (0.606) 0.917 (0.579) 0.446 (0.584) 2.441** (0.602) 1324.66

N = 1055; Robust standard errors in parentheses. Significant at 10%. * Significant at 5%. ** Significant at 1%. a Response categories are rescaled to assign higher scores to stronger sentiments against immigrants.

+

Education has a negative effect on all four outcome variable, so that those who are more educated are less likely to hold negative views on immigrants. Compared to Latino respondents, non-Hispanic Whites have higher degrees of negative attitudes toward immigrants in all four aspects, while non-Hispanic Blacks are more negative in all areas except for increasing crime. Citizens are more likely to have unfavorable views towards immigrants regarding all three aspects (‘‘immigrants are good for economy,’’ ‘‘immigrants take jobs away,’’ and ‘‘immigrants improve society’’), but not for increasing crime. Republicans are more likely to disagree that immigrants improve society culturally (a = .05 level). Females are less likely to believe that immigrants increase crime rates (a = .05 level), while older people, contrary to our prediction, are less likely to think that immigrants take away jobs and are not good for the economy. 6. Conclusion This study attempted to highlight the role of relational dimensions of occupational skills in explaining anti-immigrant sentiment. We initially constructed two dimensions of relational skill assets: interpersonal and instrumental skill assets at occupational level. We conceptualized the former as less culturally convertible and the latter as more portable across societies. I inspired by the recent VoC school’s emphasis on the role of ‘‘skill asset portability/specificity’’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001;

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Iversen and Soskice, 2001), we developed a new variable, ‘‘relational skill specificity,’’ utilizing the above two measures. Our central claim is that higher relational skill specificity (e.g. higher the ratio of interpersonal skills relative to the sum of instrumental and interpersonal skill assets) will be associated with less job market competition with immigrants and greater capacity to relate to the situation of others, and, thus, produce less negative feelings toward immigrants. In building the causal explanation between relational skill specificity and anti-immigrant sentiment, we primarily focused on the long-term developmental processes of ‘‘non-cognitive skills’’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) and their inconvertibility across different societies. This paper has proposed two causal paths: (1) labor market competition and labor supply; and (2) ‘personality traits’ or ‘soft skills’ formulated before and through occupational training. First, relational skill specificity may indirectly shape native workers’ attitudes toward immigrants by determining the exposure to labor market competition with immigrants (e.g. the percentage of foreign-born workers in occupations). Our hypothesis is that relational skill specificity will capture the degree of convertibility of skills across different cultures and societies, which will eventually affect the intensity of competition in the occupation-specific labor markets, leading to positive or negative feelings toward immigrants. Second, relational skill specificity may also directly affect anti-immigrant sentiments. Relational skills for occupational tasks tend to be correlated with ‘personality traits’ or ‘soft skills’ (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; John and Srivastava, 1999), such as openness, cooperativeness, and ‘‘tender-mindedness,’’ that enable a favorable understanding of immigrants’ situations and their contribution to the host society. Overall, the findings of this study impressively support our argument that relational skills play an important role in accounting for citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants as well as the composition of foreign-born workers in occupations. Coefficients of relational skill specificity remained highly significant and robust against different specifications, while controlling for predominantly strong factors such as individual-level education, citizenship status, cognitive skill variables as well as demographic, religious and political variables. Relational skills specificity has a direct, negative effect on anti-immigrant sentiments, which persists after controlling for the extent of exposure to foreign-born workers in one’s occupations. In summary, we conclude that the direct causal pathway of relational skill specificity (through personality traits’) overweighs the indirect pathway (through labor market competition and labor supply). These findings advance our understanding of occupation-based social stratification processes, ethnic competition in the labor market, and attitudinal studies of race and minorities. Although previous scholarship has underscored the importance of cognitive skill assets in migration processes and attitudes toward immigration and out-group populations, the importance of relational skills has not received much attention. We find that the findings of this study may provide a novel pathway of causal explanation of how native individual workers develop their anti-immigrant sentiments, along the line of ‘‘group threat’’ theory (Blalock, 1967; Blumer, 1958; Bobo, 1983; Quillian, 1995). Group threat theory posits that each native individual worker should have a priori membership with a dominant group (a majority ethnic/racial group) and be exposed to direct competitions with immigrants in their local residential settings or labor markets. Our study has shown how ‘perceived threats’ are formulated from a combinational process of individuals’ ‘non-cognitive skills’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) and ‘economic vulnerability’ (Bonacich, 1972; Borjas and Tienda, 1987), operating through occupational skill closures, as well as the capacity to understand others’ situation. Therefore, our theory and findings extend the applicability of the logic of ‘group-threat theory’ to occupational boundaries beyond conventional racial/ethnic boundaries. The notion of ‘relational skill specificity’ enriches ‘group-threat theory’ by illuminating how the origin of prejudice toward out-group populations is not only based on racial/ethnic groupings, but also individuals’ skill assets formed along occupational lines. This study has some limitations that need to be addressed. First, the heterogeneity of immigrants and their labor market experiences is not fully taken into consideration. Depending on the year of entry, country of origin, and destination, each immigrant may not only have a different composition of skill assets, but also face widely varying labor market situations in the host society. Second, this paper does not fully explicate why the indirect effect of relational skill specificity through the proportion of immigrants in occupations is non-significant. However, it is important to note that having a higher percentage of foreign-born workers in one’s occupation can lead to both positive and negative feelings toward immigrants. While native workers may feel threat due to increased competition, they may also develop solidarity with immigrant co-workers. Other factors, such as the geographic concentration of immigrants, the gap between actual and perceived group size, and the absence of measures of direct contact with immigrants (Kunovich, 2013a), further complicate the issue. Future research may employ rich datasets on immigrant populations to investigate the relationship between occupational skills and labor market outcomes. Anti-immigrant sentiment may be partly a combinational product of inadvertently evolved, macro-level occupational segmentation, global movements and reconfiguration of labor forces, and individuals’ strategic responses to changing labor-market situations. In the recent debates of immigration reforms, the Obama administration has expressed an interest to open the doors for more high-skilled immigrants, especially in the tech sectors. What would this entail for the native citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants? On one hand, the general public may view immigrants more favorably with the increase in the number of high-skilled professionals. On the other hand, professionals with high levels of relational skill specificity may feel threatened by the influx of high-skilled foreign-born workers, but, at the same time, may exhibit positive attitudes toward immigrants because they are better able to understand others’ situations.23

23

Thus, we may predict ‘constant/stable’ anti-immigrant sentiments among professionals despite an increase in the number of high-skilled immigrants.

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An increasing number of immigrants in a society shake the structure of nativity that has been formulated over a long course of time. Immigrants will try to find cracks and rooms to carve out their own occupational niches in receiving societies, despite being constrained by their cognitive and non-cognitive skill assets, while natives also build their own defensive mechanisms to maintain the inherited institutions. Those may include educational credentials, occupational skill complexity, and more importantly, interpersonal or social skills specific to the cultural sensitivities of the host country. This study suggests that occupation-specific compositions of relational skill assets may be one of those criteria which both native and immigrant workers utilize in order to maintain or secure their spaces in the labor market and social hierarchies. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Edward Laumann, Kazuo Yamaguchi and John Levi Martin for their insightful comments and critiques. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Social Science Research who have provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Appendix A A.1. Summary statistics

Variables

Mean

SD

Minimum

Maximum

Anti-immigrant Sentiment Composite Index Sex (Female = 1) Age Education Part time Unemployed Retired Non-employed Conservative Protestants Mainline Protestants Catholics Non-Hispanic White Non-Hispanic Black Non-Hispanic Others Latino Citizenship Republican Union membership Cognitive skill complexity Interpersonal skill Instrumental skill Relational skill asset specificity % Foreign-born in R’s occupation

2.65 .56 45.17 13.97 .11 .08 .14 .13 .26 .14 .24 .75 .13 .03 .09 .96 .40 .10 5.53 3.92 3.45 .54 .12

.76 .50 15.90 2.75 .32 .26 .35 .34 .44 .35 .43 .43 .33 .18 .28 .19 .49 .31 1.90 2.65 2.68 .28 .09

0.94 0 18 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1.26 1 1 .11 0

4.70 1 89 20 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 8.50 9 8 .90 .61

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A.2. Correlation coefficients among key independent and dependent variables AS Anti-Immigrant Sentiments (AS) (Composite Index) Reasoning Development (R) (Component for Cog. Complexity) Math Development (M) (Component for Cog. Complexity) Language Development (L) (Component for Cog. Complexity) Specific Vocational Preparation (S) (Component for Cog. Complexity) Relation to Data (D) (Component for Cog. Complexity) Cognitive Skill Complexity (Comp) (Composite Index) Interpersonal Skill Standard (P) (Relation to People) Instrumental Skill Standard (T) (Relation to Things) Relational Skill Specificity II (RSII)a (Standardized)

R

M

L

S

D

Comp

P

T

RSII

1.00 0.20

1.00

0.18

0.87

1.00

0.22

0.93

0.86

1.00

0.84

0.85

0.16 0.17

0.89 0.85

0.80

0.83

1.00 0.83

1.00

0.19

0.95

0.91

0.93

0.96

0.93

1.00

0.20

0.62

0.45

0.60

0.53

0.58

0.59

0.03

0.02

0.26

0.32

0.12 0.19

0.09 0.38

0.02 0.23

0.15 0.43

0.02 0.33

1.00 0.50

1.00

0.80

0.89

1.00

a Z-scores of P and T were constructed separately, and then 2.58 were added to make both scales bigger than 0. Then, the specificity formula, pj/(tj + pj), was used to generate the specificity score (RSII).

Appendix B. Detailed definitions of worker functions: interpersonal and instrumental skill standards.a Scores

Interpersonal skill standards (relation to peopleb)

Instrumental skill standards (relation to thingsc)

1

Taking instructions-helping: Attending to the work assignment instructions or orders of supervisor. (No immediate response required unless clarification of instructions or orders is needed.) Helping applies to ‘‘non-learning’’ helpers Serving: Attending to the needs or requests of people or animals or the expressed or implicit wishes of people. Immediate response is involved

Handling: Using body members, handtools, and/or special devices to work, move, or carry objects or materials. Involves little or no latitude for judgment with regard to attainment of standards or in selecting appropriate tool, object, or materials Feeding-offbearing: Inserting, throwing, dumping, or placing materials in or removing them from machines or equipment which are automatic or tended or operated by other workers Tending: Starting, stopping, and observing the functioning of machines and equipment. Involves adjusting materials or controls of the machine, such as changing guides, adjusting timers and temperature gauges, turning valves to allow flow of materials, and flipping switches in response to lights. Little judgment is involved in making these adjustments Manipulating: Using body members, tools, or special devices to work, move, guide, or place objects or materials. Involves some latitude for judgment with regard to precision attained and selecting appropriate tool, object, or material, although this is readily manifest Driving-operating: Starting, stopping, and controlling the action of machines or equipment for which a

2

3

Speaking-signaling: Talking with and/or signaling people to convey or exchange information. Includes giving assignments and/or directions to helpers or assistants

4

Persuading: Influencing others in favor of a product, service, or point of view

5

Diverting: Amusing others, usually through the medium of stage, screen, television, or radio

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285

Detailed definitions of worker functions: interpersonal and instrumental skill standards.a (continued)

Scores

a

Interpersonal skill standards (relation to peopleb)

6

Supervising: Determining or interpreting work procedures for a group of workers, assigning specific duties to them, maintaining harmonious relations among them, and promoting efficiency. A variety of responsibilities is involved in this function

7

Instructing: Teaching subject matter to others, or training others (including animals) through explanation, demonstration, and supervised practice; or making recommendations on the basis of technical disciplines

8

Negotiating: Exchanging ideas, information, and opinions with others to formulate policies and programs and/or arrive jointly at decisions, conclusions, or solutions

9

Mentoring: Dealing with individuals in terms of their total personality in order to advise, counsel, and/or guide them with regard to problems that may be resolved by legal, scientific, clinical, spiritual, and/or other professional principles

Instrumental skill standards (relation to thingsc) course must be steered or which must be guided to control the movement of things or people for a variety of purposes. Involves such activities as observing gauges and dials, estimating distances and determining speed and direction of other objects, turning cranks and wheels, and pushing or pulling gear lifts or levers. Includes such machines as cranes, conveyor systems, tractors, furnace-charging machines, paving machines, and hoisting machines. Excludes manually powered machines, such as handtrucks and dollies, and power-assisted machines, such as electric wheelbarrows and handtrucks Precision working: Using body members and/or tools or work aids to work, move, guide, or place objects or materials in situations where ultimate responsibility for the attainment of standards occurs and selection of appropriate tools, objects, or materials, and the adjustment of the tool to the task require exercise of considerable judgment Setting up: Preparing machines (or equipment) for operation by planning order of successive machine operations, installing and adjusting tools and other machine components, adjusting the position of workpiece or material, setting controls, and verifying accuracy of machine capabilities, properties of materials, and shop practices. Uses tools, equipment, and work aids, such as precision gauges and measuring instruments. Workers who setup one or a number of machines for other workers or who setup and personally operate a variety of machines are included here Operating-Controlling: Starting, stopping, controlling, and adjusting the progress of machines or equipment. Operating machines involves setting up and adjusting the machine or material(s) as the work progresses. Controlling involves observing gauges, dials, etc. and turning valves and other devices to regulate factors such as temperature, pressure, flow of liquids, speed of pumps, and reactions of materials

The entire table was excerpted from Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1991), pp. 1005–1014. People: Human beings; also animals dealt with on an individual basis as if they were human. c Things: Inanimate objects as distinguished from human beings, substances or materials; and machines, tools, equipment, work aids, and products. A thing is tangible and has shape, form, and other physical characteristics. b

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Appendix C C.1. Anti-immigrant sentiments against percentage of foreign-born and relational skill specificity (using Huber–White robust standard errors) Clustered in 160 occupations

Sex Age Education Part-time Employed Unemployed Retired Non-employed Fundamental Protestant Mainline Protestant Catholic Non-Hispanic White Non-Hispanic Black Other (Non-Hispanic) Citizenship Republican Union Membership

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

0.045 (0.043) 0.004* (0.002) 0.088** (0.008) 0.001 (0.065) 0.068 (0.095) 0.004 (0.074) 0.065 (0.070) 0.158** (0.058) 0.132* (0.065) 0.085 (0.068) 0.520** (0.087) 0.500** (0.095) 0.008 (0.110) 0.472** (0.119) 0.030 (0.047) 0.072 (0.084)

0.040 (0.042) 0.004* (0.002) 0.082** (0.008) 0.001 (0.066) 0.064 (0.093) 0.010 (0.077) 0.068 (0.072) 0.153** (0.058) 0.134* (0.064) 0.082 (0.067) 0.513** (0.084) 0.496** (0.092) 0.004 (0.109) 0.489** (0.118) 0.035 (0.046) 0.061 (0.082) 0.293** (0.084) 0.259 (0.298)

0.043 (0.041) 0.004* (0.002) 0.086** (0.010) 0.002 (0.096) 0.071 (0.087) 0.008 (0.053) 0.064 (0.047) 0.161+ (0.082) 0.136+ (0.068) 0.086 (0.083) 0.513** (0.089) 0.498** (0.088) 0.005 (0.103) 0.463** (0.138) 0.025 (0.062) 0.062 (0.088)

0.040 (0.042) 0.004* (0.002) 0.081** (0.011) 0.001 (0.093) 0.066 (0.086) 0.012 (0.053) 0.067 (0.049) 0.154+ (0.084) 0.136* (0.065) 0.083 (0.084) 0.510** (0.085) 0.495** (0.084) 0.006 (0.101) 0.484** (0.137) 0.033 (0.060) 0.057 (0.084) 0.287** (0.067)

0.751* (0.318)

0.358 (0.323)

2.958** (0.193) 1055 0.181

3.065** (0.189) 1055 0.190

Relational Skill Specificity % Foreign-born in R’s Occupations

Clustered in 28 large occupation categories

0.528+ (0.280)

% Foreign-born in R’s 28 Larger Occ. Categories Constant N R-squared Robust standard errors in parentheses. + p < 0.1. * p < 0.05. ** p < 0.01.

3.009** (0.151) 1055 0.180

3.087** (0.148) 1055 0.190

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C.2. Anti-immigrant sentiments against percentage of foreign-born and relational skill specificity in 47 large occupational groups (using HLM models) HLM models in 47 large occupational groups Model 1 Individual level Sex Age Education Part-time Employed Unemployed Retired Non-employed Fundamental Protestant Mainline Protestant Catholic White (Non-hispanic) Black (Non-hispanic) Other (Non-hispanic) Citizenship Status Republican Union Membership

0.0500 (0.0457) 0.0039* (0.0017) 0.086** (0.0086) 0.00504 (0.0697) 0.0692 (0.0834) 0.0103 (0.0792) 0.0617 (0.0678) 0.162** (0.0576) 0.136+ (0.0696) 0.0861 (0.0593) 0.516** (0.0819) 0.504** (0.0987) 0.00862 (0.139) 0.468** (0.118) 0.0283 (0.0467) 0.0593 (0.0713)

0.0393 (0.0446) 0.0038* (0.0017) 0.082** (0.0086) 0.00704 (0.0693) 0.0634 (0.0832) 0.0123 (0.0786) 0.0593 (0.0675) 0.156** (0.0575) 0.135+ (0.0694) 0.0847 (0.0591) 0.511** (0.0816) 0.500** (0.0983) 0.00138 (0.138) 0.476** (0.117) 0.0292 (0.0466) 0.0577 (0.0708)

0.695* (0.338) 2.961** (0.196) 0.470 0.00312 0.00658 2204 1055

0.267** (0.0899) 0.342 (0.334) 3.077** (0.196) 0.469 1.12e 07 2.38e 07 2196 1055

Occupation group-level Relational Skill Specificity % Foreign-born in 47 Occ groups Constant Level 1 variance Level 2 variance Intraclass correlation Chi-square N Robust standard errors in parentheses. + p < 0.1. * p < 0.05. ** p < 0.01.

Model 2

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