The Immigration-to-Reproduction Shift: Latino Population Growth and White Support for Legal Abortion
Published in , 2025
The literature on White Americans’ reaction to demographic change continues to focus on immigration despite the fact that the ethnic diversification of the United States is increasingly driven by non-White births. We extend past research on White backlash against ethnic diversification to the domain of reproductive policy—testing the idea that prejudiced Whites will support abortion in response to growing minority populations as a means of slowing demographic change via non-White reproduction. Using large-N and original surveys of the American public, we find that Whites residing in locales with substantial growth in the Latino population are more supportive of access to legal abortion. This relationship is not observed among non-Whites and is confined to Whites higher in prejudice. We replicate these findings with a series of pre-registered experiments showing that priming prejudiced Whites to think about Latino population growth increases their support for racially-targeted abortion as well as other reproduction-limiting policies.
Recommended citation: Reny, T., Roman, M., & Newman, B. "The Immigration-to-Reproduction Shift: Latino Population Growth and White Support for Legal Abortion."
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