Mobilizing fears? How proximity to deportation threat affects political participation

Abstract Policies often provoke political changes, which are collectively known as feedback effects. Studying state variation in immigration policy, scholars have shown that proximity to hostile policy tends to mobilize Latinos. But not every member of the Latino community is likely to perceive the same proximity to anti‐immigrant policies. We argue that when people worry that deportation is a risk to them, they are likely to withdraw politically, but when they worry about their close social network's risk of deportation, they are likely to mobilize. We use the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post‐Election Survey to test these relationships during a time of heightened anti‐immigrant policy proposals from then‐candidate Donald Trump. We find mixed evidence for our hypotheses. While perceived threat of deportation to one's network is negatively related to validated voter turnout, there is a substantial positive relationship between network threats and non‐voting participation. We also show that personal threats of deportation have no effect on mobilization once network threats and ties to undocumented people are accounted for. Our findings advance the literature on how proximity affects policy feedback effects by directly capturing perceived proximity to policy threat, net of objective proximity, and including forms of participation open to noncitizens.