Criminological research on immigrants has been primarily concerned with the criminality of immigrants. Less concern has been paid to immigrants as victims of crime In his review of the literature, for instance, Satyanshu Mukherjee of the Australian Institute of Criminology concluded that âapart from hate crime , there has been little concern in criminal victimization of immigrants.â1 This comes as no surprise given that in 1967 the Presidentâs Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice declared that âone of the most neglected subjects in the study of crime is its victims.â2 Although the pioneer victimologist Hans von Hentig , himself an immigrant, devoted substantial attention to the depredations inflicted upon immigrants by criminal and unscrupulous predators,3 until recently victimologists have not pursued that topic.4 Virtually nothing more was done until the Fifth International Symposium on Victimology in 1985. Even then there was not much about immigrant victims.5
The lack of interest in the topic is surprising given what was known about immigrants and foreigners. For example, von Hentig observed that â[t]here is a tendency all over the world to make the foreigner bear blame for others. Their different appearance, their poverty, the life in the slums, all render them suspect.â6 And Stephan Schafer, another early victimologist , explained that immigrants are like âethnic minorities, and others who are in a socially weak position [and so] are often exploited by the criminal element.â7 By the time Biko Agozino of the School of Science, Liverpool, began writing about the subject, the immigrant was seen in a more complex way. He wrote,
[T]he immigrant is not the typical criminal but the typical criminalised person, not the typical example of the individual offender being punished but the model of the innocent being victimized as a member of a demonised category.8
These days stories about the criminal victimization of immigrants are daily fare in the media. A Maryland legislator tells the press, â[i]t bothers me to see how our (immigrant) community is victimized by so many fraudulent scams.â9 Similarly, a former German police officer says, âYou donât find foreigners on the streets in eastern Germany past 6 or 8 p.m. In the villages, itâs difficult for the police because often their own sons are involved in the violence ⊠And the rightists have some sympathizers among the police . Iâve heard police say, âAll foreigners are criminals, and the young people help us keep the countryside clean.ââ10
An article from a New York City paper reports that âassaults in which perpetrators are people of color have become more commonâand victims tend to be immigrants from every imaginable origin. The change is a matter of sheer demographics.â11 An article from the Head of the Forced Migration Studies Program at Witswatersrand University, South Africa reads: âXenophobia is turning immigrants into âmobile ATMsâ for police and criminals who see them as a source of instant cash.â12 A news service story about illegal immigrants traveling from Central America through Mexico to the USA describes the trip as like the running of a brutal gauntlet in which everyoneâgood, bad, or indifferentâtakes the opportunity to victimize the immigrants.
The journey is extremely dangerous. The stories these seven men tell highlight the perils faced by the hundreds of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and others who begin the trip every day. The men in the shanty say that since they entered Mexico at the southern state of Chiapas a few days earlier, they have seen or experienced just about everything: Some have been beaten, forced to pay bribes, robbed by law enforcement officers, ripped off by shopkeepers and bus drivers, cheated by smugglers, ambushed and mugged by gun-toting bandits.13
Nowhere is free from the abuse of immigrants, even in a nation of immigrants. In 1957, for example, the Australian Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council wrote the following:
A not unimportant matter that was mentioned by a number of Police Officers in each of the States was that, whilst undue publicity was given to the offenses alleged to have been committed by migrants, little or nothing was said of the many instances when European migrants had been assaulted or robbed or otherwise ill-treated by the undesirable sections...