Whom and when to deport and punish: Experimental evidence on Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants in the criminal legal system

Abstract

Across many immigrant destination countries, recent immigration law enforcement has expanded in scope and salience, intensifying public debate over deportation, criminal punishment, and the treatment of immigrants in the criminal legal system. Drawing on focal concerns theory, the current study uses the U.S. as an empirical case and a 4 (country of origin: Syria, China, Russia, or Mexico) × 2 (crime severity: felony drug offense or misdemeanor trespassing) × 2 (possibility of judicial error: certain or uncertain witness) × 2 (legality: valid work visa or expired tourist visa) online survey experiment with a national sample of U.S. adults to examine public preferences for deportation and criminal punishment of immigrants arrested for non-immigration offenses. Results indicate that legality is significantly associated with both deportation and imprisonment preferences, and that respondents rely on overlapping considerations when evaluating immigrants’ deportability and criminal culpability. Although the uncertainty of evidence reduces imprisonment preferences, it has no effect on deportation preferences, suggesting greater public tolerance for errors and mistakes in the context of immigrant removal. Together, these findings suggest that punishment decisions involving immigrants are shaped in part by concerns about undocumented status, even when individuals are formally processed through the criminal legal system.