Understanding Attitudes Towards Immigrants

Anti-immigrant prejudice operates at multiple levels—individual attitudes, institutional practices, media narratives, and political discourse—creating conditions where immigrant-origin students, who comprise 26% of the U.S. school-age population, experience exclusion rather than belonging. This prejudice isn’t just harmful to those it targets; it impoverishes entire communities by limiting civic participation, reinforcing false divisions, and preventing us from building the inclusive democracy we claim to value.

Schools sit at a critical juncture. They can reproduce these patterns of prejudice—through curricula that marginalize immigrant contributions, policies that create barriers for immigrantorigin families, or classroom cultures where some students are positioned as problems rather than assets. Or schools can interrupt these patterns by becoming what we call “belonging infrastructure”—systematic environments where all students experience dignity, where
migration is understood as universal human experience, and where young people develop the tools to recognize and resist prejudice.

Breaking cycles of prejudice requires understanding how they form and persist. This isn’t abstract theory—it’s practical knowledge that helps educators make strategic choices. When you understand how economic scapegoating works, you can help students think critically about
immigration claims. When you recognize how segregation reinforces prejudice, you can design classroom structures that create meaningful interaction. When you see how media frames shape attitudes, you can teach students to analyze what they consume.

This guide walks through key research on how anti-immigrant prejudice develops—economic scapegoating, social isolation, identity threat narratives, social learning patterns, media influence, policy signals, and historical amnesia. Each section explains the pattern, what research shows,
why it matters for educators, and most importantly, what you can do about it. The research reveals that prejudice isn’t inevitable—it emerges from specific, changeable conditions. And schools directly control many of those conditions