Immigration and Crime in the Local News: Exploring the Macrolevel Covariates of Coverage and Framing

Abstract

Contrary to empirical evidence, immigration is seen as increasing rates of crime among the public. However, most people draw from secondary sources—including local news media—to form such opinions. We examine the contextual factors impacting whether and how local media describe the immigration–crime nexus. Using data constructed from content analysis of over 3,800 news articles, we find that the likelihood of local media providing coverage of immigration and crime varies as a function of the violent crime rate, minority population size and growth, and religious and political conservatism. Additionally, news “frames” depend on contextual factors too: Articles in more affluent communities with growing minority populations link immigration to higher rates of crime but are less likely to discuss the protective effects of immigration or immigrant refugees.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.