Does perceiving immigration policy as unstable reduce immigrants’ felt inclusion in the United States?

The instability of U.S. immigration policies has had deleterious consequences for the material and mental well-being of immigrants. Changes in policies serve as a powerful source of information about social norms, with downstream consequences for attitudes and beliefs. We examined whether perceiving immigration policy as unstable would have similar consequences for reducing immigrants’ felt inclusion in the U.S. Across two experiments with a general sample of immigrants and a sample of first- and second-generation immigrants with origins in Mexico, Central America, South America, or the Caribbean (total N = 1,511), we manipulated immigrants’ perceptions of federal immigration policy instability and examined their feelings of inclusion in the U.S. Across experiments, immigrants’ felt inclusion remained unchanged across conditions even when participants reported higher perceived immigration policy instability in the experimental condition. We theorize that the substantial instability in federal immigration policy over the last decade may have led immigrants to become desensitized to changes in immigration policy.