Determinants of North American Chief Executives’ Immigration Actions: Racial Ideology, Partisanship, or Ethnic Identity?

This paper, a chapter from a book manuscript on the immigration policies of US presidents and Canadian prime ministers, aims to explain why individual chief executives took pro- or anti-immigration actions when proposing, signing, or vetoing bills and when issuing executive orders or orders in council. Based on my newly created database of all available immigration-related actions since 1789 or 1867, the Logit/General Estimating Equations analysis confirms the role of white supremacist ideology in both countries and of ethnic identity in the US but yields no support for the partisanship hypothesis.