Immigrants1 and immigration issues occupied a center stage position during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The Republican candidate Donald Trump on many occasions during the campaign made derogatory comments about Mexican immigrants, calling them criminals, rapists and drug smugglers, and repeatedly promised to build a wall along the United States (U.S.)âMexico border to keep them away. Immediately after taking office in January 2017, President Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to overhaul the countryâs immigration system in the direction of more difficult entry for illegal and legal immigrants alike. In March and September, President Trump twice issued Executive Orders featuring travel bans, ranging from suspended immigrant and non-immigrant travel to permitting travel for non-immigrants with additional scrutiny, on people from eight mainly Muslim countries. In addition, reflecting the newly elected Presidentâs public policy priorities, in April 2017 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) warned major sanctuary cities,2 such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, that their federal grant funds would be in jeopardy if they did not comply fully with federal immigrant law. In October, DOJ delivered a âlast chanceâ notice to sanctuary cities urging them to reconsider their policies on immigration before the federal government took action against them. In September 2017, the Trump administration announced its intention to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a 2012 initiative taken by President Obama by Executive Order that grants temporary protection from deportation to an estimated 800,000 individuals who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children.
The most recent wave of anti-immigration activism in the U.S. has become a centrepiece of the new Administration. Albeit still early in his presidency, Donald Trump has deliberately engineered a major crackdown on immigration at a national level that has not been witnessed for many decades. Although this is not the first time in American history that immigrants have been aggressively and discriminatorily targeted, the current Administrationâs anti-immigration rhetoric and arbitrary approach remain highly controversial and undoubtedly cast a profoundly dark shadow on many aspects of social life in much of American society. This is particularly the case within communities where immigrants are welcomed as valued members of their communities and within immigrant communities and families.
Historically, the U.S. has been a nation of immigrants. The U.S. foreign-born population (i.e., those who were not U.S. citizens at birth) has nearly tripled over the past five decades, increasing from 4.7% in 1970 to 12.9% in 2010. The largest shares of immigrants during the past decade are from Latin American and Asian countries, contrasting with the foreign-born from mostly European countries who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s and earlier. The topic of immigration has been a controversial issue in political and public discourse for a very long time, with some heated debates surrounding the crime, public safety and policing dimensions of the issue. Scholars have long scrutinized the relationship between the police and minority immigrant groups in the U.S., often documenting tensions, discrimination, and differential treatment at the hands of local police. Indeed, the history of American policing is replete with examples of serious and sustained conflict between local police and various minority immigrant groups.
The primary purpose of this book is to discuss a range of issues surrounding race, ethnicity, and immigrant status in U.S. policing, with a special focus on immigrant groupsâ perceptions of the police and factors that shape their attitudes toward law enforcement. We utilize research approaches such as historical, etiological, and comparative analyses, and we analyze both original and secondary data. Our goal is to not only systematically introduce relevant evidence and theoretical models related to immigrantsâ assessments of the police, but to also shed light on potential challenges and difficulties that legal authorities are likely to face during an era of increasingly tightened control over immigrant populations in the country.
The Interplay of Race/Ethnicity, Immigration and Policing
While crime and justice researchers have explored the past and current potential links between immigration and crime, immigrantsâ perceptions of their local police have largely been ignored. This is the case even though immigrantsâ views of the police most likely have important implications for policing, in particular with respect to police-community relations. Moreover, issues arising from the intersection of immigration, race/ethnicity and policing are not unique to the U.S. This combination of factors has produced large-scale unrest in French, Dutch and English cities and townships alike in recent decades. Positive police images encourage voluntary support and promote cooperation from immigrants, which is critical for controlling crime and maintaining order in todayâs increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and globally oriented society. Police-community relations in ethnically diverse population centers may be strained by a host of immigrant-specific issues, including matters of language incompatibilities and cultural barriers, adverse country of origin experiences with corrupt and/or incompetent police, and immigration status-related legal issues. Recent federal agency requests for local police departments to enforce federal immigration law often further complicate relations between local police and the publics they serve. Given these concerns, the research base on citizensâ views on the police needs to be broadened and deepened to include various distinct immigrant groups and immigrant-specific issues.
The investigation of immigrantsâ perceptions of the police has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, understanding immigrantsâ attitudes toward the police fills a gap in the literature on public evaluations of the police, a literature which has seldom taken into serious account the interplay of race/ethnicity and immigrant status in shaping such attitudes. Specifically, knowledge of this kind advances the theoretical development of public opinion on the police by shedding light on whether various factors found in previous research to be predictive of White and Black Americansâ perceptions of the police can be applied to racial majority and minority immigrants. Put into practical terms, information about immigrantsâ attitudes toward the police provides valuable baseline evidence, allowing law enforcement agencies to implement suitable policies and practices for policing immigrant communities.
Research relying heavily upon the dichotomous WhiteâBlack division or the White-Other-Black racial gradient misses the complex dynamics of contemporary police-community relations and grossly oversimplifies the diversity present across minority groups. Non-Black minority groups, many immigrant groups included, have not been incorporated into current analysis to a sufficient degree. Without addressing these groupsâ unique characteristics and experiences, a theoretical framework that aims to explain public perceptions of the police cannot be complete. In this book, we take the initiative to chart the experience and perceptions of Hispanic, Chinese and Arab immigrants, documenting not only the variations, but also the commonalities across groups. Effectively integrating past research, we propose an integrated conceptual model that includes both general factors that tend to influence public evaluations of the police for all racial/ethnic groups as well as immigrant-specific factors that are likely to shape immigrantsâ perceptions only.
This conceptual model incorporates a variety of existent theories and proposes new ones that intend to uncover the sociological structure, culture, and process that may contribute to group differential views on the police. It is hoped that this model can to a certain extent relieve the current sore limitation of lacking guiding theoretical frameworks in data analysis in studies on immigrant perceptions of the police. Altogether, it is hoped that this book may engender more interest in theoretically guided empirical research on immigrant minority perceptions of the police. This is the main rationale behind the writing of this book.
A Focus on Three Immigrant Groups
The book strategically chooses to elaborate on the perceptions of three rapidly growing yet understudied ethnic groupsânamely, Hispanic/Latino, Chinese, and Arab Americans. Discussion of their perceptions of and experience with the police revolves around several central themes, those being theoretical frameworks, historical developments, contemporary perceptions, and emerging challenges.
These specific immigrant groups are selected at this particular time for several compelling reasons. Latinos represent the largest minority group in the U.S., andâalong with Asian Americansâhave been the fastest growing group in this country. Similarly, for Arab Americans, between 2000 and 2010 there was an approximate 47% increase in the population size of this group. In addition, all these groups have diverse groups within their communities that reject a simplistic, over-generalized view on their perceptions of the police. For example, the varying racial identities (i.e., White, Black, and non-White and non-Black) among Hispanics and Arabs and the substantial disparities in socioeconomic status and immigration backgrounds among Chinese immigrants make their assessments of the police complicated, requiring a more nuanced understanding of public perceptions of police in America. Finally, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (hereafter referred to as â9/11â) have made almost all groups of immigrants living in the U.S., especially people who have an Arab ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage, more visible groups for law enforcement attention. The current focus on Hispanic, Chinese and Arab immigrants facilitates our identification and summary of some common themes across major immigrant populations, and serves as a springboard for launching future research on other immigrant groups who may be less visible and large in population in the nation.
The Organization of the Book
This book consists of eight chapters, with three to four sections present in each chapter. Chapter 2 focuses on three major themes surrounding the role of race and ethnicity in U.S. policing, including relevant theoretical explanations for minoritiesâ attitudes toward the police, official statistics and empirical evidence related to racial/ethnic differences in arrests, use of deadly force, and traffic stops, and the race and ethnicity influence on public evaluations of the police. Chapter 3 discusses the ideologies, beliefs and theories that underline social control strategies toward immigrants developed in the U.S., explains how a variety of immigrant groups were treated and policed historically, clarifies the complex connection obtaining between immigrant groups and their records of criminal offending, and delineate...