Research indicates that people are fearful of immigrants in the context of criminality, victimization, and immigration in the United States because they believe immigrants are a danger to their safety and participate in many violent crimes and property crimes. This paradigm of thought is fueled by films and television shows such as The Untouchables, The Godfather, Scarface, Miami Vice, and The Sopranos, all of which project a negative picture of immigrants.
Quantitative research, however, has consistently shown that being foreign born is usually negatively related to crime and is not substantially linked to the committing of either violent or property crime. If an illegal immigrant is prosecuted for a criminal offence, it usually happens to be a misdemeanor. Through several Immigration new, researchers believe that because, in most cases, immigrants migrate to another country to earn money and not to attract attention to themselves, illegal immigrants may be less likely to participate in serious criminal offending behavior.
Immigration policies, sadly, are often influenced more by fear and misconceptions than by empirical evidence. As a result, immigrants have the reputation of "criminal" ascribed to them by an ever-evolving set of laws and frameworks for immigration enforcement.
In truth, higher immigration causes the crime rate of a country to decrease.
At the same time as the immigrant population has increased, the Uniform Crime Reports published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) show the decrease of both violent crime and property crime.
U.S. researchers have discovered that immigrants, legal or illegal by the U.S. Immigration Law, are not the source of the urban crime epidemic and that immigrants do not raise crime rates. However, via immigration news, economically disadvantaged communities can, where social support networks do not exist or are missing, make immigrant groups more vulnerable to crime victimization. The U.S. population falsely considers foreign-born immigrants to be serious criminals, despite research results on crime and immigration.