Abstract

Immigrants have several tools at their disposal to assimilate into and cross over nativity and racial/ethnic boundaries in receiving countries. First names, for example, can mark immigrants’ children as more ‘American’ and less ‘immigrant’ and perhaps limit discrimination based on nativity status. However, limited research examines how Americans perceive such names, restricting scholarly understanding of who is allowed to cross nativity and racial/ethnic boundaries. We conduct four survey experiments with 6,651 respondents, examining 80,920 perceptions of multi-generational nativity, citizenship status, and race/ethnicity from 712 racialized names. We find that respondents rate fully-ethnic Chinese, Hispanic, and Indian names as more likely to belong to recent immigrants and less likely to belong to citizens than White and Black names. Respondents rate anglicized first names with ethnic last names between those groups. Moreover, they view anglicized first names with Hispanic last names as less likely to belong to recent immigrants and more likely to belong to citizens and Whites than other ethnic counterparts. Our findings suggest that (1) individuals with anglicized Hispanic names are most able to cross boundaries and (2) overall boundaries based on nativity may be more porous than those based on race and ethnicity.