Spring 2018 Clara Mayo Award Winner

Here to help or hurt? How Framing Muslim Immigrant Willingness to
Self-Police Affects Support for Immigration Policies

Mona El-Hout

I am honored to be a recipient of the Clara Mayo Award. I am especially excited for this project as this work is in collaboration with my colleagues—Sara Driskell, Olivia Holmes, and Darren Agboh whom I met in the summer of 2017 at the Summer Institute for Social and Personality Psychology. As part of the Psychology of Inequality course, we were required to come up with a research study inspired by the course content and our learnings. Based on Jackman’s (1994) ideas on the ways in which dominant groups in the U.S. work to maintain the social hierarchy, and the exploitative relationship between dominant and subordinate members of society, my group and I decided to examine the potential exploitative relationship between Americans and U.S. immigrants. Due to refugee crises in predominantly Muslim countries, Muslims are an ever growing, yet highly stigmatized population in the US. About 76% of all U.S. Muslims are immigrants or born to immigrant parents (Pew Research Center, 2017). Immigrants in the U.S. are particularly targeted under the current administration and are very often dehumanized in the media and by political leaders as a result.

Our research question, therefore, is whether dehumanization of immigrants, specifically Muslim immigrants, would still occur if the dominant class perceived the immigrant population as useful, or something that can be exploited. One way to exploit the Muslim immigrant population is to have group members self-police their communities for signs of threat. Building on social dominance orientation (SDO) research, we will be examining whether Americans high in belief in a social hierarchy would dehumanize Muslim immigrants less if they are told that Muslim immigrants are willing to self-police their communities for threat, which may have implications for anti-immigration policy support. Examining the effects of different framing narratives about Muslim immigrants allows researchers and policy makers to explore ways to garner support for Muslim immigration policies, even among highly anti-Muslim US citizens. We hope this research will provide the first steps for developing interventions to decrease dehumanization and increase support for recent Muslim immigrants, work that is critical in an increasingly anti-Muslim national climate.

Mona El-Hout, M.S
University of South Florida

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