Why People Believe Undocumented Immigrants Cause More Crime
Xia Wang wanted to find out why so many Americans believe undocumented immigrants commit more crime.
“The weight of evidence suggests that immigration is not related to more crime,” said Wang, an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. “But this body of scholarship doesn’t seem to affect the public’s perception. The public consistently perceives immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, as criminal.”
To better understand why that perception exists, Wang used data from a poll of more than 1,000 people in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas. She applied the minority threat perspective, a theory that seeks to explain why minorities are treated differently by law enforcement. The results were published last month in an article that appeared online in the journal Criminology.
Wang found the belief that undocumented immigrants cause crime was due in part to the perceived population size of the immigrant community overall.
“If somebody is perceiving undocumented immigrants as a larger proportion in the population, they are going to perceive undocumented immigrants at a higher level of criminal threat,” Wang said. “And what’s interesting is a lot of people have very distorted and exaggerated views of the population size of undocumented immigrants.”
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