Growing diversity does not increase votes for anti-immigration candidates

Donald Trump's anti-immigration views were a feature of his 2016 presidential campaign. To what extent was his unexpected victory driven by voters' anger over immigrants moving into their neighborhoods, attending their children's schools, or working in local businesses? Not at all, according to a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Gregory A. Huber. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences , examined whether demographic changes at the voting-precinct level - particularly influxes of Hispanic immigrants - caused an electoral shift toward Trump relative to past Republican presidential candidates.  " We found no evidence that places that are growing more diverse are becoming more Republican or that increases in local immigrant populations generated support for Donald Trump," said Huber, the Forst Family Professor of Political Science. "In fact, our results showed that if anything, these kinds of demographic changes were more likely to benefit his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton." Huber and co-authors Seth J. Hill of the University of California-San Diego and Daniel J. Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania based their analysis on a dataset of election results and demographic measures for nearly 32,000 voting precincts in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington state during the 2012 and 2016 elections. The recent success of anti-immigration candidates and political parties in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other democratic nations have raised questions about how increasing ethnic and racial diversity affect voting patterns.