The Impact of Media Coverage of and Public Concern with Immigration on Jail Incarceration: The Importance of Context

• In Event: Communities and Place: Immigration and Communities

Abstract

Despite extensive empirical evidence showing that immigration does not lead to increases in crime, the purported immigration and crime link has been used to buttress increasingly punitive immigration policies over the past few decades. By integrating moral panic theory with research on immigration, crime, and punishment, this study proposes that the inflammatory language surrounding immigration in media and public discourse has punitive consequences for immigrants. To understand whether increased concern over immigrant criminality impacts punishment, data on newspaper coverage and Google search volumes for the term “illegal immigration” are collected, alongside county–level jail data from the entire United States. The findings of this study suggest that the symbolic power of moral panics linking immigration to crime has punitive consequences, and that these relationships operate differentially depending upon the spatial distribution of immigrant populations.

Author

• Faraneh Shamserad, University of Missouri-St. Louis