Anxious Publics

Abstract

In this article the authors investigate the relationship between concerns about crime and concerns about immigration. Panel survey data from Germany allow the authors to examine people’s views about immigration as they develop over time, showing that consternation about crime is a significant predictor of anxiety over immigration. Moreover, it has a greater substantive impact than other explanatory factors, such as concerns about the economy and objective measures of crime and immigration at the regional level. The authors also demonstrate an interactive effect: The connection between these two issues is especially strong among those interested in politics. A confirmatory step using the European Social Survey reveals that the moderating effect of political engagement is generalizable to the rest of Western Europe. These findings establish that crime is a critical issue for the formation of immigration attitudes. They also highlight individual-level characteristics that drive the bundling of political issues in people’s minds.

Keywords

immigration attitudes crime political interest Germany Western Europe panel data

Many citizens of immigrant-receiving countries think immigration boosts crime. Public opinion polls show that a majority of Western Europeans make this connection, as do large numbers of people in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Africa.¹ This widespread sentiment is curious given the absence of reliable statistical support. Objective reports from single and multicountry studies suggest that immigration does not actually elevate crime rates (e.g., Aebi, 2004; Hiatt, 2007). Recent U.S. research even finds that immigration is associated with lower levels of crime (e.g., Sampson, 2008; Wadsworth, 2010). Thus, an interesting puzzle emerges: If immigration does not actually increase crime, what causes citizens to perceive such a close association between these issues?

Reconciling this disconnect between reality and public perceptions can help get to the heart of anti-immigration attitudes. It can also provide insight into the processes through which people connect political matters in their minds. To these ends, we test three explanations of people’s views toward immigration. First, we ask whether certain contextual circumstances—most notably, the prevalence of immigrant arrests in the area of residence—fuel opposition to immigration. Second, we investigate whether anxiety over crime drives immigration concerns. Third, we test an interactive thesis: that attention to politics amplifies the relationship between crime anxiety and immigration concerns.

We use German panel survey data to unpack people’s immigration attitudes. Examining where people stand on immigration from year to year provides unusual insight into micro-level shifts in attitudes over time, enabling us to parse out both the determinants and causal order behind immigration views. The results demonstrate that crime concerns are important propellers of immigration concerns; in fact, the weight of this effect surpasses the influence of economic worries and objective regional conditions. We also find that politically interested citizens are especially likely to adjust their immigration views based on safety concerns. In some respects this is to be expected because political sophisticates are the most likely people to hold mental schemas or maps linking political issues in coherent ways (Converse, 1964, 2000). But it is also surprising since this issue pairing has questionable validity. In a confirmatory analysis, we draw on the cross-national European Social Survey (ESS) to test the generalizability of these patterns. Overall, these findings enhance our understanding of how attention to politics can forge issue connections that are not supported by objective information.

The Empirics

Surveys

The cognitive tie between issues of immigration and crime is strong in Western Europe. Figure 1 shows that a large majority of Western European participants in the 2002 wave of the ESS and the 2003 wave of the International Social Science Program (ISSP) survey think that immigrants make crime problems worse. The ESS asks, “Are [country’s] crime problems made worse or better by people coming to live here from other countries?” More than 73% of the native-born Western Europeans answer that immigration makes crime problems worse (see Panel A). German responses (not depicted in figure) are above average: More than 77% of respondents claim that immigrants contribute to crime in Germany. Western Europeans judge less harshly immigrants’ impact on the national economy and culture; the corresponding statistic for the economic effects of immigration is 36%, and for cultural influence it is 18%.²

Figure 1.

Panel A: Perceived immigration threats European Social Survey (ESS), 2002: West Europe sample

Similarly, nearly 59% of Western European respondents in the ISSP National Identity Survey agree with the statement “Immigrants increase crime rates” (Panel B).³ The corresponding statistic for Germany is nearly 66%. As in the ESS data, the proportions of respondents who think that immigrants threaten the economy, the job market, and the nation’s culture are significantly lower.⁴

Crime Statistics

Although prevalent in people’s minds, the association of immigrants with crime lacks consistent objective evidence. A recent literature review on the effects of immigration on crime in the United States and Western Europe reveals a mixed empirical picture (Hiatt, 2007). In Germany, first-generation guest workers are no more likely than natives to engage in crime, though second- and third-generation foreigners are overrepresented in crime statistics (Albrecht, 1997). This reflects a potential self-selection effect in which the most ambitious and well-intentioned individuals tend to immigrate in the first place (Tonry, 1997). A U.S. neighborhood-level study in three southern border cities finds that areas with high concentrations of Latinos do not have especially high homicide rates (Lee, Martinez, & Rosenfeld, 2001). And new time series analyses show that immigration is actually associated with fewer homicides and robberies across U.S. cities (Stowell, Messner, McGeever, & Raffalovich, 2009; Wadsworth, 2010).

These snapshots of contemporary research underscore the importance of our analysis: If immigrants are not necessarily more prone to crime, why are most natives convinced they are? Criminologists and sociologists have asked this very question for decades, noting that such impressions are extremely robust to disconfirming evidence (Durkheim, 1933/1997; Gusfield, 1963; Hagan, Levi, & Dinovitzer, 2008; Roché, 1993; Sayad, 2004). Most explanations point to the fusing of these issues by elites; however, such suspicions have rarely been subjected to empirical test. Here, we assess this relationship statistically from a public opinion perspective.

Elite Rhetoric and Media Coverage

Politicians in many countries have publicly linked immigration and crime. Anti-immigrant radical right parties are especially clear in binding these issues. An Italian poster from a popular protest in support of the Lega Nord reads, “Immigration=crime” (Baker, 2002). The far right German National Party blended these issues in a 2008 demonstration in North Rhein-Westphalia: “Gegen Überfremdung, Islamisierung und Ausländerkriminalität!” (“Against excessive immigration, Islamization, and immigrant criminality!”; Keitsch, 2008). And Pauline Hanson, former leader of Australia’s One Nation party, claims, “You can’t bring people into the country who are incompatible with our way of life and culture. . . . They get around in gangs and there is escalating crime that is happening” (Rehn & Watts, 2007).

Mainstream political actors have also coupled these issues. France’s Nicholas Sarkozy (as interior minister) seized headlines in 2005 with his vow to clean out the criminal rubbish in immigrant neighborhoods and ascended to the presidency partly on promises to tackle crime and immigration (Chrisafis, 2009). In Italy, Berlusconi’s high approval ratings are attributed to “popular crackdowns on crime and immigration” (Nadeau, 2009). In 2007, British Conservative David Davis linked immigration to violent crime in public statements (Morris, 2007). Similar sentiments have come from the left: Spain’s socialist Zapatero targeted immigrant communities to ferret out terrorists and gang members (Baker, 2002). And Germany’s Social Democrats have pledged tough treatment of foreigners found guilty of crime (Hoadley, 2003).

A recent event highlights the salience of the immigration–crime link in German media and politics: In 2007, security cameras documented two young immigrants assaulting a native German retiree on the Munich subway. The event was highly publicized, spurring popular demands for immigration reform and harsher penalties for foreign criminals (Kulish, 2008). Subsequently, a prominent Christian Democratic leader stated, “We have spent too long showing a strange sociological understanding for groups that consciously commit violence as ethnic minorities” (Murphy, 2008). Chancellor Angela Merkel supported this point, announcing that nearly half of criminal offenders younger than 21 are “foreign youths” (Kulish, 2008).⁵

Theory

Dominant Explanations of Anti-Immigration Attitudes

Most explanations of immigration attitudes hinge on mechanisms of threat, which has been disaggregated into two main dimensions: economic and symbolic (Green, 2009). On the economic side, realistic group conflict theory predicts that competition over scarce resources—such as jobs, wages, low-income housing, and social services—will spur intergroup animosity (Esses, Jackson, & Armstrong, 1998; Gang, Rivera-Batiz, & Yun, 2002; Nagel, 1995; Olzak, 1994). Some threat models test formal economic theories by examining the effects of individuals’ personal skill levels (Hainmueller & Hiscox, 2007; Mayda, 2006; O’Rourke & Sinnott, 2006). Others study the ways in which consternation over the national economy shapes views toward immigrants and immigration (Citrin, Green, Muste, & Wong, 1997; Kiewiet, 1983; Lahav, 2004; Popkin & Dimock, 2000). In Germany, perceptions of economic threat drive anti-immigrant sentiment (Raijman, Semyenov, & Schmidt, 2003).

Alternately, sociopsychological theories posit that immigration attitudes stem from perceptions of cultural threat (Fetzer, 2000; Sides & Citrin, 2007; Sniderman, Hagendoorn, & Prior, 2004). Here, the key motivation for anti-immigrant views is prejudice and intergroup hostility (Green, 2007, 2009; Quillian, 1995; Riek, Mania, & Gaertner, 2006; Stephan & Stephan, 2000). Much of this recent work tests social identity theory, which posits that an individual’s sense of self derives from group categorization and comparison (see Tajfel, 1982). People organize their social worlds into groups, determine their own placement, and seek to confirm that their group is of higher status than others. This process leads to out-group stereotyping as people strive to denigrate the status of “others.”

Safety Threat

A few scholars have tested the effect of perceived safety threat on immigration attitudes. Single-country studies reveal that people who blame immigrants for crime have more restrictive immigration preferences in the United Kingdom and Canada (McLaren & Johnson, 2007; Palmer, 1996). These patterns also hold in cross-national studies that find a link between the perception that immigrants bring crime and orientations toward immigration in general (Hainmueller & Hiscox, 2007; Mayda, 2006). Though informative, these studies have the drawback that their measures of crime concern are “coupled”: They combine safety concerns with perceptions of immigrants. (These measures are presented above in the discussion of ESS and ISSP descriptive trends.) Because attitudes toward immigrants are represented on both sides of the equation, such studies cannot estimate the effects of crime worries on immigration views without anti-immigrant prejudice contaminating the analysis (on this point, see Sniderman & Hagendoorn, 2007). Our analysis avoids this pitfall because the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) measures we use for immigration and crime attitudes are conceptually and operationally distinct.

Other relevant studies also avoid this complication. In Israel, perceived security threats related to terrorism influence people’s attitudes toward immigrants (Canetti-Nisim, Ariely, & Halperin, 2008). And experimental evidence from the Netherlands reveals that worries about crime predict negative judgments about immigrants (Sniderman & Hagendoorn, 2007).

Despite the contribution of these works, lingering questions about the connection between feeling unsafe and condemning immigration are (a) whether concern about crime influences how people feel about immigration (or if the influence flows only in the opposite direction) and (b) to what extent attitudes toward immigration stem from objective contextual circumstances. Furthermore, existing work cannot tell us who among the public is most likely to associate these issues.

A realistic conflict perspective would prompt an examination of objective conditions, which we offer below. In the case of crime, societal law and order may be perceived to be at stake. If people see (or think they see) that immigrants around them are likely to commit crime, such a perception can emerge. Of course, the threats people perceive need not be significant or even real (Cornelius & Rosenblum, 2005); out-group bias may be at the heart of crime concerns. Negative stereotypes of immigrants as deviants—with values incompatible with those of the host society—may play a role in shaping assessments of immigration’s effect on societal safety (McLaren & Johnson, 2007). Support for this notion comes from evidence that racial attitudes are important drivers of crime policy preferences (Peffley & Hurwitz, 2002). Below, we address the possibility of reverse causation: that biases against immigrants drive crime concerns, rather than vice versa.

Elite and Media Framing

Even if there was a clear statistical link between crime rates and immigration, constraints on time and cognitive capacity mean most people will not thoroughly investigate and dispassionately weigh the evidence to form judgments (Downs, 1957; Lau, 2003). Instead, research shows that rational individuals use heuristics to make up their minds on issues (Lau, 2003; Lau & Redlawsk, 2001; Sniderman, Brody, & Tetlock, 1991) and that a key mental shortcut is to take cues from trusted political elites (Kuklinski & Hurley, 1994; Kuklinski & Quirk, 2000; Mondak, 1993). Such elites have been found to aid people in framing issues and connecting issue pairs (Chong, 1993; Nelson, Oxley, & Clawson, 1997). And more than most people, politically knowledgeable citizens are guided by trusted media sources (J. M. Miller & Krosnick, 2000); these citizens also learn more from the media than their less engaged counterparts (Rhee & Cappella, 1997; Zaller, 1992) and have the cognitive capability to link different political issues (Carmines & Stimson, 1982).

Studies on perceptions of minorities demonstrate that the media have effectively bundled race and crime in people’s minds (Hurwitz & Peffley, 1997; Valentino, 1999). And sensational coverage of violent crimes by immigrants increases individuals’ perceptions of threat (Burns & Gimpel, 2000). Looking specifically at media coverage as it relates to immigrants, some evidence signals that elites play a role in shaping immigration views in Europe (McLaren, 2001). Dutch anti-immigrant parties enjoy the greatest public support when media content is packed with immigration-related stories (Boomgaarden & Vliegenthart, 2007), and the Swiss radical right has benefitted from shifting trends in media coverage over time (Albertazzi, 2007).

This body of research, combined with anecdotal evidence of widespread crime–immigration pairing in politics and the media (in Germany and elsewhere), suggests a top-down thesis: People adopt messages from elites and the media that identify the threatening implications of immigration. We therefore hypothesize that people who are interested in politics will pick up on elite cues and will therefore be especially likely to entangle crime and immigration worries. We now test these predictions.

Data and Analysis

German Panel Data

For the first part of our analysis, we employ the GSOEP survey, which interviews respondents about their concerns over various social issues across nine annual waves. These data provide an uncommon opportunity to examine the development of individuals’ immigration views over time. They also allow us to unpack the relationship between immigration attitudes and crime worries because the same respondents are asked every year about their level of concern about crime and, independently, their level of concern over immigration. Data from 1999 to 2007 yield more than 100,000 person-years for analysis.⁶

The dependent variable measures an individual’s concern about immigration to Germany, scaled low to high and ranging from not at all to somewhat to very concerned. In an average year, 24% of respondents are not at all concerned whereas 30% are very concerned.

We group the independent variables into four categories. The first is key issue concerns. Worried about crime and worried about economy are scaled the same way as the dependent variable. Crime creates more worry in general, with 47% very concerned and only 9% not concerned; likewise, 37% of responses are very concerned about the economy whereas around 10% register no concern (see Appendix A for descriptive information on all variables).

The next set of predictors is contextual, measuring features of the regional (or Länder) arena: crimes per capita, unemployment, and non-German population.⁷ These objective factors will illustrate how relevant some basic conditions are for immigration attitudes. Non-German population and the unemployment rate are established predictors of anti-immigration concerns (Ha, 2010; Schneider, 2008; Semyonov, Raijman, & Gorodzeisky, 2006), though crime rates have not received the same attention. These variables can also be expected to shrink the effects that safety concerns and economic worries have on immigration attitudes if such concerns are based on realistic threat. Two more contextual factors represent, as closely as possible, the visibility of immigration threats to security and the economy in the region of residence. To capture any overrepresentation of foreigners in arrests, we include non-German suspects, a measure of the percentage of crime suspects who are not German as a proportion of the regional non-German population.⁸ We also include an interaction between non-German population and unemployment rate (in the region) to represent immigration’s economic implications. If people are driven by realistic threats—as opposed to perceptions of either economic or safety threat—these variables should be positively related to the dependent variable. As a final set of regional controls, we measure electoral environments with dummy variables for federal and regional election years to account for campaign contexts, which are known to heighten anxiety in general (Marcus & MacKuen, 1993).

The third set of predictors incorporates personal characteristics and additional controls. To capture economic insecurity, we include occupation, which is broken down by Goldthorpe’s (1999a, 1999b) classification; whether an individual is worried about finances or worried about health; education level; and home ownership. We expect that individuals in service-sector jobs with high education levels are less concerned about immigration and that home owners are more concerned (Scheve & Slaughter, 2001). Those who worry about their finances and health should be more anxious, fearing that immigration drains coveted welfare resources.

We account for the effects of cultural threat by including a dummy variable for whether the individual is of German nationality and, as noted above, by including regional statistics for the non-German population.⁹ The final personal characteristics we include are political interest, to test the influence of political engagement and—indirectly—signals from political leaders on immigration concerns, and worried about antiforeigner attacks, which accounts for any compassionate aspect of worries about immigration.¹⁰ We expect that politically interested individuals will be less concerned about immigration because they are generally less biased against out-groups (Meertens & Pettigrew, 1997) and less likely to hold anti-immigration views (Ha, 2010). And since aggression toward foreigners across Germany has drawn much attention (Koopmans & Olzak, 2004; Oberwittler & Hoefer, 2005), we suspect that concerns for the well-being of foreigners will promote concerns about immigration in general.

Political interest interactions compose the final set of predictors. To test the effects of political engagement on the likelihood that people will use their crime and economic concerns to form views on immigration, we interact political interest with worried about crime and worried about economy. Positive coefficients would mean that attention to politics boosts the connection people make between immigration and these other issues. Last, all models include year and region fixed effects to account for contextual factors not directly captured by our models.

To deal with the autocorrelation inherent in time series data as well as the suspected correlation in errors between each individual’s responses over time, each model includes a lagged dependent variable. This also addresses potential omitted variable bias and captures the dynamic nature of attitude formation and change. As such, these models can be interpreted as predicting year-to-year change in the dependent variable (Keele & Kelly, 2006). In other words, we conduct a “tough test” of whether crime concerns and other predictors have independent effects on immigration attitudes after controlling for an individual’s level of concern over immigration (and all its determinants) the previous year.¹¹ And by controlling for past immigration attitudes, we limit the confounding reverse effects of immigration views on crime concerns. We go even further to address this issue in Appendix C.¹² Observations are clustered by household because the GSOEP’s design (with multiple respondents from the same family) does not yield a sample of fully independent observations.¹³

The first model in Table 1 is a baseline ordered logit model that includes worries about crime and the economy, along with basic individual- and contextual-level factors. The main purpose of this model is to establish that crime concern is a significant predictor of immigration worries, net the effects of immigration worries in the prior year. The results signal that there is indeed a strong causal effect of crime concerns on the development of immigration worries over time. This means that immigration attitudes do not fully drive crime concerns through characterization of immigrants as social deviants. Also, the effects of worries about crime are robust to controls for regional crime, immigration, and unemployment levels, and they are a much stronger predictor of immigration worries than economic concerns. These are key findings since existing empirical work has not uncovered this set of statistical relationships.

Table 1.

Predicting concerns about immigration

	1: Baseline		2: Regional threat		3: Full		4: Interactive
Predictor	Coeff.	S.E.	Coeff.	S.E.	Coeff.	S.E.	Coeff.	S.E.
Lagged DV	1.41	(.02) **	1.59	(.02) **	1.41	(.02) **	1.40	(.02) **
KEY ISSUE CONCERNS
Worried abt. crime	.97	(.02) **			.97	(.02) **	.90	(.03) **
Worried abt. economy	.43	(.01) **			.43	(.01) **	.49	(.02) **
CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
Election year–federal	.28	(.03) **	.44	(.03) **	−.03	(.04)	−.03	(.04)
Election year–regional	−.02	(.02)	−.03	(.02)	−.02	(.02)	−.02	(.02)
Crimes percap–reg’l	1.71	(2.16)	2.43	(2.39)	.39	(2.46)	.28	(2.47)
Unemployment–reg’l	−.01	(.01)	−.04	(.02) *	−.03	(.02)	−.03	(.02)
Non-German pop–reg’l	3.41	(1.75)	4.51	(2.56)	3.15	(2.63)	3.15	(2.63)
Non-German suspects–reg’l			.05	(.02) *	.03	(.02)	.03	(.02)
Non-German pop X Unemp–reg’l			.36	(.17) *	.21	(.18)	.22	(.18)
INTERACTIONS
Pol. interest X Worried abt. crime							.06	(.02) **
Pol. interest X Worried abt. econ							−.05	(.01) **
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Occupation (ref=not employed)
Service	−.03	(.03)	−.10	(.03) **	−.13	(.03) **	−.13	(.03) **
Routine non-manual	dropped		−.03	(.04)	−.10	(.04) *	−.09	(.04) *
Self employed	.04	(.03)	−.01	(.03)	−.06	(.03)	−.05	(.03)
Manual	.16	(.03) **	.11	(.03) **	.06	(.03) *	.07	(.03) *
Unemployed	.09	(.04) *	dropped		dropped		dropped
Retired	.05	(.04)	.02	(.04)	−.05	(.04)	−.05	(.04)
Worried abt. finances	.12	(.01) **	.29	(.01) **	.12	(.01) **	.12	(.01) **
Worried abt. health	.06	(.01) **	.11	(.01) **	.07	(.01) **	.07	(.01) **
Education	−.06	(.00) **	−.08	(.00) **	−.06	(.00) **	−.06	(.00) **
Homeowner	.06	(.02) **	.07	(.02) **	.06	(.02) **	.06	(.02) **
German	.57	(.03) **	.64	(.03) **	.57	(.03) **	.57	(.03) **
Political interest	−.06	(.01) **	−.01	(.01)	−.06	(.01) **	−.07	(.03) **
Worried abt. anti-foreigner attacks	.41	(.02) **	.66	(.02) **	.41	(.02) **	.41	(.02) **
Age	.00	(.00)	.004	(.00) **	.00	(.00)	.00	(.00)
Male	.21	(.01) **	.13	(.01) **	.21	(.01) **	.21	(.01) **
Cut 1/Cut 2	2.79/5.83		.95/3.78		1.76/4.8		2.36/5.39
Wald chi²	24258**		20009**		24254.0		24311
N	104,856		105,070		104,856		104,856

Standard errors clustered by household. Models are ordered logits that control for each region and year. * p<.05; **p<.01

The regional threat model adds statistical measures of the immigration–crime and immigration–economy links and removes the indicators of worries over crime and the economy. The results show that the contextually based connections that people might make between immigration and crime are not significant. But the interaction between regional economic strain and immigration is positive and significant. This suggests that surrounding factors are relevant for immigration attitudes when they relate to the economy. The full model next pits worries about crime against the regional measures. In this more demanding specification, all the contextual threat factors lose their significance whereas the subjective worry variables remain robust. Compared to their coefficients in the baseline model, the key issue concerns do not lose any of their effect to the objective regional conditions.¹⁴ This demonstrates the power of worries over the effects of realistic threat. For immigration attitudes, threat perceptions matter much more than objective conditions, and a perceived safety threat matters more than twice as much as economic concerns.¹⁵

The last model in Table 1 (interactive model) includes interactions between political interest and worries over crime and the economy. It shows that interest in politics (which on its own is a significant and negative predictor of immigration concerns per the first three models) plays an enhancing role. Worried about crime has a stronger positive effect on immigration concerns for those who are very interested in politics compared to those who are not.¹⁶ The same cannot be said for the effect of economic concerns: Among those who are very politically engaged, economic worries are weaker predictors (though still positive) of immigration concerns. Put simply, political interest enhances the effects of crime concerns on immigration views and mitigates the effects of economic concerns.¹⁷ These findings support our suspicion that attention to elite rhetoric and media cues can trigger the connection between immigration and crime in people’s minds. Yet it is interesting that the same effect is not present for economic issues.

As for the remaining predictors, the presence of a federal election (in 2002 and 2005) raises concerns about immigration, yet regional elections do not. Personal economic factors such as financial worries and owning a home also affect immigration attitudes, but, in keeping with prior analyses, these concerns are not as relevant as concern over national economic conditions. Occupation matters as well: Service-sector workers are less likely and manual workers more likely than others to worry about immigration. People worried about their health tend to be more concerned about immigration, whereas the well educated are expectedly less so. People of German nationality are more concerned about immigration (as cultural threat theories predict), as are those who are male, older (when worries are not controlled for in the full model), and concerned about hostility to foreigners. These results confirm that anxiety over crime activates concern about immigration and imply that those who are politically interested are even more likely to reach this conclusion.

European Social Survey

We use descriptive data from the 2002 ESS to test the generalizability of the interactive patterns identified with the German data.¹⁸ As illustrated in Figure 1, many Western Europeans associate immigration with crime. We examine whether the most politically engaged citizens are especially likely to make this connection. This survey allows for better operationalization of political engagement than the GSOEP, as it includes a fuller set of relevant measures.

Figure 2 displays the relationship between a perceived crime-immigration link and three different measures of political engagement: political interest, frequency of political discussion, and daily time spent reading about politics in the newspaper. For the sake of comparison, we also plot this same set of relationships for perceptions of immigration’s ill effects on the economy and national culture. If the GSOEP results travel successfully, politically engaged persons will be especially likely to link immigration with greater crime but not with adverse economic or cultural developments. The figures display the percentage of respondents who report the highest level of threat from immigration (10 on the 0–10 scale).

Figure 2.

Cross-Tabulations between Perceptions of Threat and Engagement Measures, European Social Survey

Panel A of Figure 2 shows a pronounced, curvilinear relationship between the belief that immigrants are a very strong safety threat and political interest. Though the least politically interested most often make this association, those who are very interested are the next most likely to do so. The comparable trends for blaming economic problems and cultural demise on immigration show a more even downward pattern as political interest increases. The same basic relationship is evident for political discussion, shown in Panel B. Those who never or rarely talk about politics are the most likely to make the connection, with daily political discussants coming in as the second most likely group. Here, too, the U-shaped pattern is not clearly mirrored for the other issues. The newspaper reading measure reveals a similar dynamic (Panel C). For the crime threat, people who spend more than 3 hours per day reading about politics are more likely to blame immigrants compared to those who read the paper less frequently. The same can be said for perceptions of cultural threats, whereas the relationship between written media consumption and perceived economic threat is more erratic. We consider these patterns further below. For now, Figure 2 reinforces the GSOEP finding and demonstrates its relevance outside Germany: The most politically engaged people are more likely than most others to connect immigration with crime.

To summarize, our analysis yields three main findings. First, fear of crime is a strong predictor of immigration concerns, and it trumps worries about economic development. Second, objective measures of crime and economic threats are relatively weak predictors of immigration attitudes, emphasizing that reality is no match for the power of perceptions when it comes to attitude formation. And third, people who are politically engaged are especially likely to connect the issue of crime (but not economic or cultural problems) with immigration.

Discussion

Crime-related anxiety clearly intensifies concerns over immigration. This effect is independent of past immigration concerns, objective measures of regional crime, regional overrepresentation of foreigners among those arrested, and a host of personal characteristics and other controls. The thesis that perceptions of safety threat influence the development of immigration attitudes has never before been subjected to such a rigorous observational test. We also find that fear of crime is a stronger driver of immigration attitudes than other predictors such as worries over the economy. Given the intense scholarly interest in the roots of immigration attitudes, these findings should spur analysts toward more careful consideration of the safety dynamics behind such views.

Our finding that those most attuned to public affairs are especially likely to blame immigrants for crime, but not for economic strain, warrants further attention. Research on media content in Europe and elsewhere points to an answer rooted in the contours of news reporting. For instance, one study reports that German media coverage of immigration is dominated by economic themes most prominently, followed by cultural and then safety frames. Yet the immigration–economy link is portrayed in mostly positive terms, the immigration–culture connection is cast in relatively neutral terms, and the immigration–crime pairing is typically framed in a negative light (Bauder, 2008). Similar characterizations of newcomers as threatening social deviants are identified in Australia and Austria, among other countries (El Refaie, 2001; Pickering, 2001). More broadly, European news tends to be characterized more by crime than economic themes, and when immigration is reported on, it is framed most often in terms of conflict and much less frequently in terms of economics (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). These studies help to explain why we find that crime concerns affect immigration anxiety more than economic worries: The media set the stage for engaged audiences to connect immigration with crime.

Another interpretation of the interactive finding that high levels of political interest boost the prospects for this issue pairing is that people who are worried about crime become more politically interested, seek out information, and encounter political messages that connect crime with immigration.¹⁹ Information seeking is one strategy people use to deal with anxiety (Brader, 2005; Garofolo, 1981; Marcus & MacKuen, 1993; Valentino, Hutchings, Banks, & Davis, 2008). And the psychological weight of basic safety concerns trumps that of most economic considerations (Inglehart, 1977, 1997; Maslow, 1954).

Untangling these mechanisms would further help to explain how immigration views develop. If the real action in forging a cognitive link between crime and immigration is located in the media environment, a person could maintain a relatively high level of political interest over time and persistent media attention would enhance the issue connection. An alternate scenario is that those who fear crime experience anxiety, which deepens political interest and prompts information seeking. Here, the moving part of the process is level of interest in politics. To assess these two possibilities, we utilize the panel nature of the GSOEP. These data offer some support for the former interpretation, that politically interested people are presented with and internalize signals of a crime–immigration link. Specifically, over time an individual’s level of political interest is quite stable (see Prior, 2010), and relatively speaking it is much more stable than his or her issue concerns. The year-to-year correlation is .70 for political interest, .49 for crime fears, .42 for economic worries, and .53 for immigration concerns. And from Year 1 to Year 9 of the panel the respective correlations are .58 (interest), .36 (crime), .26 (economy), and .41 (immigration). These comparative figures support the media environment narrative over the information seeking thesis, though we suspect that these mechanisms operate in tandem.

The ESS data offer a more detailed way to interpret the interaction by showing that the correlation between political engagement and the view that immigrants bring crime is U shaped. Those most likely to buy into the notion of immigrant criminality are the least and the most engaged citizens. This pattern suggests that there are multiple mechanisms at work in pushing the two issues together for people and brings to mind the distinction between being uninformed and being misinformed about political affairs (Kuklinski, Quirk, Jerit, Schwieder, & Rich, 2000). Those who are not interested in politics, who never talk about politics, and who never read the newspaper exemplify the uninformed. Most research on immigration attitudes, which emphasizes economic threat and cultural bias, sets the stage for this finding. From these perspectives, it makes sense that unsophisticated citizens would lump immigration and crime together without much information or thoughtful reflection. More surprising in light of this literature is that the highly engaged are also more prone to connect these two issues. We propose that this makes them misinformed. This insight is supported by developments in the broader behavioral literature discussed above, which shows that politically engaged people more readily absorb media messages.

Established findings in political behavior highlight the political significance of these misinformed citizens. The most politically oriented people in society are also those most likely to vote (Denny & Doyle, 2008; Glenn & Grimes, 1968; Voogt & Saris, 2003), volunteer for campaigns (Verba, Burns, & Schlozman, 1997), engage in blogging and other online political activities (Best & Krueger, 2005; Woodly, 2008), get involved with talk radio (Hofstetter, Barker, Smith, Zari, & Ingrassia, 1999), and persuade others about politics (Hansen, 1997; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). In other words, these people are opinion leaders whose views have major political implications.

Given the psychological primacy of safety concerns for individuals, which are understood as more fundamental human needs than economic wealth, group belonging, and so on (Maslow, 1954), it is imperative that we learn more about how people come to mentally connect immigration and crime. As our results demonstrate, worries about crime can fuel anxiety over immigration once crime becomes associated with newcomers. This, combined with the fact that the citizens expected to make the most reasoned and educated political choices are among those most likely to hold immigrants responsible for crime, leaves great potential for anti-immigration views to further harden in immigrant-receiving countries.

As immigration continues, the extent to which fear of crime drives immigration attitudes has important consequences for those seeking to mobilize support for immigration and minimize prejudice toward foreigners. Our results suggest that reducing citizens’ economic and cultural concerns will not adequately alleviate antiforeigner biases. Nor may they be wholly curbed by presenting people with valid contextual statistics. Rather, the search for effective solutions must entail addressing the complex link between citizens’ feelings of insecurity and their perceptions of immigrants.

Footnotes

Appendix D

Appendix A

Descriptive Statistics, 1999–2007

Variable	Range	M	SD
Worried about immigration	0–2	1.054	0.734
Worried about crime	0–2	1.373	0.649
Worried about personal finances	0–2	0.930	0.705
Worried about economy	0–2	1.263	0.623
Professional	0–1	0.930	0.705
Unemployed	0–1	0.068	0.252
Receives social assistance	0–1	0.011	0.103
Household income (/10,000)	0–9.99	0.319	0.218
German	0–1	0.323	0.468
Male	0–1	0.498	0.499
Years of education	7–18	11.955	2.639
Age	16–100	41.283	23.302
Political interest	0–3	1.302	0.820
Worried about hostility to foreigners	0–2	1.100	0.677
Worried about environment	0–2	1.114	0.624
Year	1999–2007	2003	2.582
Regional crimes per capita(t-1)	0.054–	0.077	0.024
Home owner	0.185 0–1	0.495	0.499
Live in East Germany	0–1	0.503	0.499
Worried in general	0–1	0.012	0.108

Appendix B

Marginal Effects on Predicted Probability from Model 3

Predictor	At Minimum	At Maximum	Change
Lagged DV	.06	.50	.44
Worried abt. crime	.07	.33	.27
Worried abt. economy	.13	.27	.13
Occupation (ref=not & unemp’d)
Service	.22	.20	−.02
Routine non-manual	.21	.20	−.02
Manual	.21	.22	.01
Worried abt. finances	.19	.24	.04
Worried abt. health	.20	.23	.02
Education	.27	.16	−.11
Homeowner	.21	.22	.01
German	.14	.22	.08
Political interest	.23	.20	−.03
Worried abt. anti-foreigner attacks	.15	.28	.13
Male	.20	.23	.03

Table entries indicate the predicted probability of possessing the highest value of the DV while moving from low to high on each IV and holding all other predictors at their mean values. Calculated using the Stata prvalue command (Long and Freese 2006). Only variables passing the p > 0.05 significance threshold are included above.

Appendix C

Predicting concerns about immigration—robustness tests

	Directional ivreg		Multilevel (2005)		Ideology (2005-2007)		Interactive logit
Predictor	Coeff.	S.E.	Coeff.	S.E.	Coeff.	S.E.	Coeff.	S.E.
Lagged DV	.39	(.00) **	2.19	(.07) **	1.38	(.02) **	1.73	(.02) **
KEY ISSUE CONCERNS
Worried abt. crime	.27	(.00) **	1.29	(.06) **	1.02	(.02) **	.94	(.04) **
Worried abt. economy	.12	(.00) **	.72	(.06) **	.45	(.02) **	.47	(.02) **
CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
Election year–federal	.08	(.01) **	dropped		dropped		.43	(.06) **
Election year–regional	−.01	(.01)	dropped		−.18	(.05) **	−.04	(.02)
Crimes percap–reg’l			−8.28	(3.03) **	54.13	(15.60) **	1.95	(3.01)
Unemployment–reg’l	.00	(.00)	.03	(.02)	.11	(.03) **	−.03	(.02)
Non-German pop–reg’l	1.19	(.48) *	3.43	(1.92)	−49.70	(12.58) **	2.31	(2.99)
Non-German suspects–reg’l			−.05	(.05)	−.34	(.12) **	.57	(.49)
Non-German pop X Unemp–reg’l			dropped		.12	(.31)	.36	(.23)
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Occupation (ref = not employed)
Service	−.04	(.01) **	−.12	(.11)	−.02	(.05)	−.12	(.04) **
Routine non-manual	−.03	(.01) *	−.25	(.14)	dropped		−.11	(.05) *
Self employed	−.01	(.01)	−.01	(.11)	−.02	(.05)	−.05	(.04)
Manual	.02	(.01) *	.11	(.11)	.09	(.05)	.05	(.04)
Unemployed	dropped		.09	(.13)	.10	(.06)	dropped
Retired	−.01	(.01)	dropped		−.05	(.05)	−.06	(.04)
Worried abt. finances	.03	(.00) **	.21	(.05) **	.14	(.02) **	.15	(.02) **
Worried abt. health	.02	(.00) **	.02	(.05)	.04	(.02) *	.06	(.02) **
Education	−.02	(.00) **	−.11	(.01) **	−.06	(.01) **	−.070	(.01) **
Homeowner	.02	(.01) **	−.03	(.06)	−.01	(.02)	.02	(.02)
German	.15	(.01) **	.83	(.12) **	.55	(.05) **	.67	(.04) **
Political interest	−.02	(.00) **	−.03	(.04)	−.05	(.02) **	−.16	(.04) **
Worried abt. Anti-foreigner attacks	.11	(.00) **	.31	(.04) **	.47	(.02) **	.34	(.02) **
Age	.00	(.00)	.00	(.00)	.00	(.00)	.00	(.00)
Male	.06	(.00) **	.30	(.05) **	.21	(.02) **	.28	(.02) **
INTERACTION
Political interest X Worried abt. crime							.08	(.02) **
Constant	−.15	(.06) *	−.88	(.04) **	4.93/8.01		−2.51	(.06) **
R²/Wald chi²	R²=.41 F=1483.7		X²=1391.5**		X²=11904.8		X²=14726.4
N	104,856		13,829		40,407		104,856
Deviance (−2 x Log Likelihood)	n/a		13337.4		62806.4		94975.2
Household-Level Variance	n/a		1.26	(.07) **	n/a		n/a
Regional-Level Variance	n/a		.00	(.04)	n/a		n/a

Directional model: S.E.s clustered by household, control for region & year included, instruments = regional crime per capita & number crimes Multilevel model: 3-level multilevel model with individuals nested in (8951) households nested in (13) regions. Calculated using xtmelogit with Laplacian approxmation, models control for each region, DV = v. worried about immigration (1), not at all or somewhat worried (0). Ideology model: Ordered logit model, S.E.s clustered by household, control for region included, survey years 2005-2007. Interactive logit model: Dependent variable=v. worried about immigration (1), not at all or somwehat worried (0). S.E.s clustered by household, control for region & year included.

For all models: *p < .05; **p < .01

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Vanessa Baird, Terri Givens, Lauren McLaren, Jennifer Wolak, two anonymous reviewers, and panel participants at the 2009 International Society of Political Psychology meeting and the 2010 International Studies Association meeting for many helpful comments and suggestions. This study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, located at the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

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