In the recent times, the hypothesis that immigration causes crime or that higher immigration rate is linked to higher crime rate has come to be challenged in the scholarship and empirical literature. Studies have demonstrated that higher crime rates are not necessarily explained by higher immigration; for instance, a study based in the United States demonstrated that the drop in crime beginning in the early 1990s is partially explained by increased immigration. Another research study presented findings suggesting that immigrants are more law-abiding than the native born. These findings are supported by other studies. Interestingly, a study also presents evidence that immigrants are less likely to engage in crime when they reside in neighbourhoods that are largely populated by other immigrants. Despite these research studies, there is a general or popular perception that increased immigration leads to increased crime. This begs further research in the context of Australian immigration in order to explore why a link between crime and immigration is drawn despite there being credible challenges to the theory that immigration leads to crime. One of the explanations that can be used to explore this further is to be found in the moral panic theory. For students who are willing to delve into this topic for their criminology dissertation, seeking criminology dissertation help can provide valuable guidance and support in navigating through the complexities of this subject matter.
Australia has seen increased immigration from Asian countries in the recent past, with the category of migrants increasingly seen to be as unwelcome. Increasingly, immigrants and refugees from Asian and African countries have been portrayed as “unwanted invaders” who must be deported from the country. The fear of immigrants has led to the use of security language in the national discourse in Australia where the government and the mainstream media uses a language of threat and possible crime from the immigrants to garner public support for strict immigration laws. There is increased negative reporting in the media related to ethnicity and crime and one study suggests that the perceptions around crime in Australia increasingly take ethnic connotations, with general perceptions on criminality of youth belonging to Asian, African or Arab ethnicities. The impact of the negative media reporting on crime and ethnicity has also had impact on the way Australia responds to refugees. Therefore, this area deserves to be explored further to assess how far moral panic may play a role in this conceptualisaiton of ethnic criminality in the national discourse.
With regard to Muslim immigrants in particular, there is a portrayal in media with implication in terrorism related crimes where an entire community may be seen as a ‘suspect community’ because of the negative media reporting or the formation of a general public perception of Muslims as terrorists. In Australia, as in other western countries, there is a more generalised perception of Muslims as terrorists which has led to creation of measures such as immigration detention which is used as social control mechanisms to deal with immigrants.
This research study will use the theory of moral panic to explore this issue of link between crime and immigration further. The theory of moral panic explains how moral panic may be created due to the media and the popular discourse emphasising on the perception of threat posed by a particular event or the group of people involved in the event. Mass media and Social Media have allow the creation of narrative and images that can lead to the negative perceptions about a community without actually reflecting the truth about the community. This research study will explore how far the perception of link between crime and immigration is impacted by moral panic created through media reporting on crimes committed by immigrants and whether the actual incidence of crime is accurately represented by such reporting.
The overarching research question in this research is related to whether moral panic theory explains the perception of link between crime and immigration in the Australian context. The research questions are framed as follows:
RQ1. How does literature explain the link between crime and immigration?
RQ2. Is the perception of higher crime due to higher immigration justified by the actual state of crime by immigrants?
RQ3. What is the role played by media and political discourse in creating perceptions around the link between increased crime rate due to increased immigration?
This research is proposed to be a qualitative research design, because of its ability to conduct insightful and analytical research in research areas involve complexity or multi-layered data. The link of crime with immigration is a complex area with multiple narratives within the scholarship which can be adequately considered and represented in a qualitative research study. This makes the research amenable to a qualitative research design.
The qualitative research method will be used in this research to gather qualitative data from secondary sources and existing empirical studies that can explore the ways in which moral panics can be used to explain the linking of crime to immigration and how this relates or represents the crime data.
The method chosen to collect data in this research is literature review. The literature review method is used to explore the major themes in existing research around the area of research. The literature review method for collection of data is used to identify and collect all the existing quality literature and empirical data on the subject of research. Bettany-Saltikov provides a method that can be systematically utilised for conducting a literature review. Such a process would “collate all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question”. The systematic review method will be used in this study to locate and collate all the recent literature on crime and immigration in Australia in the period between 2010-2020 so that the researcher can eliminate bias by referring to all relevant literature that comes within the scope of inclusion criteria.
A systematic review method helps the researcher in limiting the scope of research by systematically identifying the sources of data. Bias can also be eliminated by the researcher by applying a process that moving from the identification and selection of the high quality literature to the appraisal, synthesis and collation of this literature. Systematic review is also useful in that it helps the researcher to identify grey literature, such as PhD theses or conference papers that can provide empirical data for the research (Bettany-Saltikov, 2012, p. 68).
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