Historical roots of contemporary worries about immigrant crime in European societies

Abstract

revious cross-national comparison research has mainly considered contemporary forces to explain current public views about immigrants’ impact on crime. We argue that a historically informed perspective can improve our understanding of such views. In our study, we explore how two macro-historical explanatory factors—countries’ varied histories of crimmigration and past geopolitical threat—are related to the perception of immigrants’ impact on crime in European societies today. A country is considered to have a pronounced history of crimmigration when immigration law and criminal law have become increasingly intertwined over time (1980–2014). When a country faces the loss of or a threat to its national sovereignty or territory during or after nation-state formation (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), it is deemed to have been geopolitically threatened. Multilevel regression analyses based on the 2002 and 2014 European Social Survey (ESS) data from 21 countries, controlling for individual- and other country-level factors, indicate that current worries about immigrant crime in European societies have historical roots. Current public views about immigrants’ impact on crime are more evident in countries with more severe past geopolitical threat rather than being affected by a country’s history of crimmigration. The findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to research on criminalization of immigrants.

Jan-Philip Steinmann

Postdoctoral researcher

Head of the research unit “Aetiology of Deviance” at the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN), Germany