New political issues and opportunities lead new actors into contentious politics. This article studies one such case: transnational migrants making claims and engaging in collective action when traversing state borders. As global migration flows and accompanying political backlash has grown since the mid-2010s, borders have increasingly become sites of contention between groups of migrants seeking entry and state agents attempting to refuse it. Media coverage and elite discourse also has focused on contentious border crossings, with implications for public attitudes toward migration. In this setting, public attitudes toward migrants should vary based on the migrants’ tactics and characteristics. We expect migrants engaging in nonviolent resistance to security forces will win more public support than those engaging in violence. Migrant characteristics – claims or motives for migration and ethnic identity – should also affect support. Survey experiments in the United States and Mexico containing fictionalized vignettes of a contentious event at the countries’ shared land border show strikingly similar results: migrant nonviolent resistance, compared to violent confrontations, reduces support for deportation and increases beliefs that migrants contribute to society. These effects are consistent across party lines and border proximity. Neither migrants’ claims nor migrants’ ethnic identity affect public support in the context of a contentious event.

中文翻译：

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边境地区的争议性政治：非暴力和移民特征如何影响公众态度


新的政治问题和机会引导新的参与者进入有争议的政治。本文研究了这样一个案例：跨国移民在穿越国家边界时提出索赔并采取集体行动。自 2010 年代中期以来，随着全球移民潮和随之而来的政治反弹的增长，边境日益成为寻求入境的移民群体和试图拒绝入境的国家代理人之间争夺的场所。媒体报道和精英话语也集中在有争议的越境问题上，这对公众对移民的态度产生了影响。在这种情况下，公众对移民的态度应该根据移民的策略和特点而有所不同。我们预计，与参与暴力冲突的移民相比，对安全部队进行非暴力抵抗的移民将赢得更多的公众支持。移民特征——移民的主张或动机以及种族身份——也应该影响支持。在美国和墨西哥进行的调查实验中，包含两国共同陆地边界上有争议事件的虚构小插曲，结果惊人地相似：与暴力对抗相比，移民的非暴力抵抗降低了对驱逐出境的支持，并增加了移民对社会做出贡献的信念。这些影响在不同党派界限和边境接近程度上是一致的。在有争议的事件中，移民的索赔和移民的种族身份都不会影响公众的支持。