Zombie ideas and moral panics: Framing immigrants as criminal and cultural threats
Zombie ideas and moral panics: Framing immigrants as criminal and cultural threats
- November 2, 2016
- Q and A with Ruben Rumbaut, UCI Distinguished Professor of Sociology
In a letter criticizing the increase in immigration to the United States, a prominent politician wrote, “Few of their children in the country learn English....The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages.... They will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” This was not Republican candidate Donald Trump on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, but rather, Benjamin Franklin in 1753. (Franklin had also previously expressed hostility toward German immigrants in 1751.) As his statements show, anxieties about immigration—particularly those concerning the assimilation and character of incoming populations—have changed little even over the course of more than two centuries.
Rubén G. Rumbaut, Distinguished Professor of sociology at UC Irvine, is a current visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a leading scholar on immigration. He's the co-author or co-editor of several books including Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (2001), Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (2001), and the RSF book Immigration Research for a New Century (2003). He's studied the persistence of myths and stereotypes associated with immigrants, including the belief that immigrants are likely to be criminals. This claim in particular has been repeated as recently as this week, when presidential candidate Donald Trump called for increased border security and the deportation of undocumented immigrants, arguing that a Clinton administration would let “650 million people pour in in one week.” Earlier, in June 2015, he opened his campaign by saying of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
Rumbaut has conducted several studies using the decennial census, crime records, large-scale surveys, and other data sources that show that immigrants, including those who are undocumented, are in fact less likely to commit crimes than the native-born or to be incarcerated. Other research supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, including a 2015 National Academies of Sciences study chaired by Mary C. Waters (Harvard), has echoed this finding. In a new interview with the foundation, Rumbaut explained why centuries-old misconceptions about immigrants—which he calls “zombie ideas”—have continued to proliferate to this day.
Click here for the full transcript, courtesy of the Russell Sage Foundation.
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