Racial Identities, Linguistic Proficiency, and Public Attitudes Towards Immigrants: Evidence From Two Surveys in Taiwan

Are host populations more accepting of immigrants who are racially similar and/or linguistically proficient in the host vernacular? The empirical focus in the literature has been largely dominated by Western democracies where the host society is white—and therefore the immigrants are often non-white. As such, we lack a theoretical explanation for how race moderates other markers—for example, language—when it comes to immigrant attitudes. To remedy this, we shift the focus to Taiwan, where the “New Residents”—a new catch-all census category for all post-1987 immigrants regardless of race, language, and national origins—offers an empirical opportunity to test our theory. In a conjoint experiment of Taiwanese attitudes and a survey of New Residents, we find attitudes are (1) most positive for Han Chinese who can speak a Taiwanese vernacular; (2) the least positive for Han Chinese who cannot speak a Taiwanese vernacular; and (3) relatively positive when immigrants are neither racially similar nor linguistically proficient. These findings, however, are conditional on the New Residents being from a non-politicized country (i.e., not China). The results have implications for how we study immigration, Taiwanese politics, and the Chinese diaspora.