Citizenship and Level-Change Threat Effects on Sentencing

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.