Citizenship and Level-Change Threat Effects on Sentencing
Abstract
Abstract Historically, tests of the minority threat theory in criminal punishment have focused on racial/ethnic minority groups, and less on other marginalized groups such as non-citizens. This relative oversight of non-citizens is important because (1) recent decades have been witness to record increases in immigration, and (2) a prominent feature of contemporary American political discourse is the linking of immigrants to crime—in particular, to illegal drugs. In addition, the focus on immigration provides a compelling opportunity to extend minority threat theory by assessing an oft-neglected dimension of the theory—the joint salience of threat level and change. Using a merged dataset of federal drug sentences (2014 to 2019) and publicly available population information, we run a series of multi-level logistic and Poisson regression models to assess whether punishment differs for non-citizen and citizen drug defendants across areas of different foreign-born levels, changes, and level-change combinations. Some statistical, but never substantive, support for minority threat theory exists at incarceration. At sentence length, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that district sensitivity to foreign-born population growth is moderated by the baseline level of the foreign-born populace. Implications for theory and research are discussed.
Metadata is indexed. Open-access discovery has not completed for this record yet.
No local PDF is available.
GROBID Extracted text; discontinued.
This text is generated from TEI extraction for accessibility, search, and TTS. Formulas, tables, figures, page layout, and references may not perfectly match the original PDF.
No accessible text representation is available. The text extraction service has been discontinued for the time being. If you require this service, for accessibility or any other reason, please submit an issue/request on this page.
Metadata
Issues
No public issues have been filed for this DOI.
Submit an issue
Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-000-4755057 |