Many states have witnessed growing xenophobia and hostility towards refugees alongside the framing of refugees as a serious security or criminal threat in public discourse. Making use of an original cross-national survey of adults in Canada, this article explores the link between fear of crime and negative views of refugees. Its results reveal that even after controlling for alternative explanations, people with more fear of crime are significantly more likely to express anti-refugee sentiments. These results have implications for understanding ongoing challenges in maintaining domestic support for refugee protection and the importance of dispelling myths that refugees are sources of criminality.

De nombreux États ont connu une montée de la xénophobie et de l’hostilité à l’égard des réfugiés, ainsi qu’un cadrage de ces derniers comme une grave menace sécuritaire ou criminelle dans le discours public. S’appuyant sur une enquête transnationale originale menée auprès d’adultes au Canada, cet article explore le lien entre la peur de la criminalité et les perceptions négatives à l’égard des réfugiés. Ses résultats démontrent que même en tenant compte d’autres explications, les personnes qui ont une plus grande peur de la criminalité sont significativement plus susceptibles d’exprimer des sentiments anti-réfugiés. Ces résultats ont des implications pour la compréhension des défis actuels dans le maintien du soutien domestique à la protection des réfugiés et soulignent l’importance de dissiper les mythes selon lesquels les réfugiés sont une source de criminalité.

Forced migration and asylum seeking are facts of contemporary politics with an undeniably global salience. An estimate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2023) puts the world’s refugee population under the organization’s mandate at 29.4 million in 2022. Although the UNHCR’s displacement figures represent the highest on record, these do not include 5.9 million Palestinian refugees under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or those displaced from the war in Ukraine (UNHCR, 2023). At the same time, the enduring impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have only further deepened the refugee crisis that the international community continues to confront, having significantly impacted effective asylum access as well as disrupting refugee resettlement. With recent efforts to reform the global refugee regime having proven relatively ineffective, the role of individual states in the provision of asylum and humanitarian assistance to refugees has remained essential to realizing international protection.

Although the majority of refugees are hosted by countries in the Global South, liberal democratic states in the Global North continue to play a necessary role in providing protection and supporting the norms of the refugee regime. However, many of these states are witnessing growing xenophobia and hostility towards refugees, coupled with the implementation of increasingly restrictive government policies towards migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (McKeever, 2020). In this context, the framing and subsequent treatment of refugees and migrants more generally as a serious security or criminal threat have become more prevalent and pervasive (Haynes et al., 2004; Hestermann, 2018; Ng et al., 2019). Lawlor and Tolley’s (2017, p. 978) study of print media in Canada, for instance, finds that security, which includes framing refugees as criminals, was “the most predominant frame in refugee coverage.”1

Indeed, prevalent stereotypes of refugees as criminals and would-be terrorists appear to have become common currency across the public spheres of Western states (Kivimäki & Nicholson, 2021; Pickering, 2008). One only need to look at the predominate framing of refugees and migrants more broadly as criminals by the former US presidential administration, as well as statements by public figures across Europe, ranging from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, to appreciate the contemporary ubiquity of such tropes. The presence of these stereotypes appears surprisingly mainstream even in domestic contexts that might suggest otherwise. The albeit short-lived position of minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction in Canada offers an apt example of how refugees and crime are often linked together in both public discourse and official policy (Trudeau, 2018).

If refugees are increasingly viewed as potential criminals, what are the consequences of such portrayals? In this article, we explore the link between self-reported fear of crime and attitudes towards refugees. While previous research has identified intergroup contact (Gravelle, 2018), cultural and economic threat (Harell et al., 2012), political orientation (Banting, 2010), and personality (Pruysers, 2020) as important explanatory factors, considerably less work has considered how general fear of crime and stereotypes of refugees as criminals can produce more negative attitudes towards these particular out-groups (but see De Coninck, 2022; Hermanni & Neumann, 2019; Landmann et al., 2019). Combining intergroup threat theory (Stephan et al., 2015) with the fear of crime literature (Box et al., 1988; Hale, 1996), we consider the possibility that individuals who are fearful of crime are more likely to hold negative attitudes towards refugees.

To explore the link between fear of crime and negative views of refugees in Canada, we made use of an original cross-national survey of more than 2,500 voting-aged Canadian adults. Our results reveal that even after controlling for a number of alternative explanations, such as political orientation, party identification, employment status, sex, and a variety of others, fear of crime is a key piece of the puzzle for explaining why some individuals express anti-refugee sentiments. In fact, fear of crime outperforms many standard socio-demographic and political variables in our models. The results have significant implications for understanding some of the challenges to maintaining effective domestic support for refugee assistance and highlight the importance of dispelling the myth that refugees are a source of criminality.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the significance of Canadian leadership in the contemporary refugee regime (Milner, 2021). In this context, Canada has become a central figure in the global politics of refugee protection, presenting itself internationally as an exemplar in providing humanitarian assistance to displaced persons and in demonstrating sustained domestic support for these policies. This has unfolded against a broader backdrop of growing anti-refugee sentiment across Europe and North America, with marked public opposition in several countries to supporting government spending on refugee assistance. Canada is also relatively unique in having a well-established and decades-old private sponsorship program, although the United States and the European Union (EU) have expressed increasing interest in creating similar programs.2

Originally intended to supplement the Canadian government’s international commitments, this model allows groups of citizens to directly facilitate the resettlement of refugees by pledging financial resources and offering social support. The program has commanded impressive domestic backing; more than 2 million Canadians have been directly involved in assisting refugees through private sponsorship (Environics Institute for Survey Research, 2018a). Privately sponsored refugees have outnumbered those resettled though government assistance since 2013, and in 2019, this stream constituted two thirds of all arrivals (Van Haren, 2021). These dynamics highlight how support from civil society plays a crucial role in the Canadian context and is translated into tangible outcomes that affect refugee protection.

The above emphasis on the positive dimensions of Canada’s support of refugee assistance should be qualified by acknowledging crucial tensions that have emerged domestically over the past 5 years. In particular, the issues of in-land asylum claims and “irregular” border crossings have become increasingly politicized (Gagnon & Larios, 2021). These dynamics can be traced to the steep rise in asylum seekers entering Canada from the United States, a situation directly triggered by the introduction of restrictive immigration and refugee policies under the Trump administration alongside the direct incentives for irregular migration produced by the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA). Although the themes of migration and refugee assistance played a prominent role in Canada’s 2015 and 2019 federal elections, the latter context saw a shift to a far more contentious context. The three major political parties all took divergent stances on the issue of rising asylum claims, with the Conservative Party demanding a tightening of the border, the New Democratic Party calling for a suspension of the STCA, and the governing Liberal Party gesturing to modernization of the agreement as a way to stem crossings. While decidedly on the fringe, the populist People’s Party of Canada was responsible for advancing an explicitly negative tone into discussions of immigration and refugees (Medeiros & Gravelle, 2023).

The continued salience of refugee policy for Canada’s major parties reveals the degree to which such issues now appear to form a permanent component of Canada’s political landscape, paralleling developments that have unfolded more dramatically in both American and European politics. Canadians’ orientations towards refugees have become increasingly complex; although public opinion has remained generally supportive of both immigration and refugee assistance (Environics Institute for Survey Research, 2021), there is a heightened need to understand the factors impacting negative perceptions of refugees given the salience of popular support for sustaining refugee policies. Gravelle (2018, p. 461), for example, notes that “Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration policy have been relatively understudied, and their attitudes toward refugees even more so.” While no research to date has considered the relationship between fear of crime and perceptions of refugees in the Canadian context, recent research from Canada does reveal that (a) dominant media frames portray refugees as criminals/security threats (Lawlor & Tolley, 2017) and (b) while attitudes towards migrants and refugees are generally supportive, there are nonetheless widespread individual differences (Gravelle, 2018; Paquet & Lawlor, 2022; Pruysers, 2020; Williams et al., 2022).

In examining why some individuals are open and accepting towards “outsiders” such as immigrants while others are less tolerant, many studies have considered the role of political orientation and ideology, typically finding that those on the right of the political spectrum are less accepting of these particular out-groups (Banting, 2010; Gravelle, 2016; Wilkes et al., 2008). Williams et al. (2022), for example, find that Conservatives and those on the right supported closing the Canada–US border during the pandemic, including to refugees and asylum seekers, at significantly higher rates than Liberals and those on the left. Other research, by contrast, has focused on individual differences in personality, noting that individuals scoring higher on traits such as agreeableness and openness tend to be more accepting of members of various out-groups (Hodson et al., 2009; Pruysers, 2020; Sibley & Duckitt, 2008). Still other studies have explored factors related to intergroup contact, revealing that interpersonal contact with immigrants or refugees tends to result in more positive attitudes towards them (Gravelle, 2018; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). A growing literature also extends concepts of deservingness to better understand how individuals come to decide which kinds of refugees and asylum seekers should be provided with support, rights, and protections (Lawlor & Paquet, 2022). Additionally, a range of socio-demographic factors such as age, sex, and income have been identified as playing a role in shaping these attitudes (Ceobanu & Escandell, 2010).

Among the most common explanations in the literature, however, is the concept of threat—usually in the form of economic or cultural threat. Intergroup threat theory (ITT) provides a useful overarching framework to employ when studying attitudes about out-groups such as immigrants and refugees (Hermanni & Neumann, 2019; Landmann et al., 2019). According to ITT, a group can experience threat when they perceive that another group “wishes to, or is in a position to, cause them harm,” and these threats can in turn produce powerful emotions (fear, anger, etc.) and activate negative attitudes and cognitions (prejudice, bias, etc.) (Stephan et al., 2015, p. 256). The threat, according to ITT, can be organized into two broad categories: realistic or symbolic.

The perception of realistic threats centre on concerns regarding “physical harm or a loss of power and/or resources” (Stephan et al., 2015, p. 257). When considering realistic threats in relation to attitudes about immigrants and refugees, the focus tends to be on economic resources. In short, labour market competition (economic threat) suggests that native-born workers, especially those in low-skilled occupations, will express more restrictive attitudes towards immigrants and refugees as these individuals are seen as “stealing” jobs from in-group members (Citrin et al., 1997; Scheve & Slaughter, 2001). Consistent with this hypothesis, aggregate economic conditions and individual-level circumstances such as employment status and economic insecurity have often been identified as predictive of negative views towards immigrant out-groups (Bilodeau et al., 2012; Burns & Gimpel, 2000; Wilkes et al., 2008).

Symbolic threats, by contrast, are about the “integrity or validity of the ingroup’s meaning system” or identity (Stephan et al., 2015, p. 257). In the context of immigrants and refugees, cultural threat focuses on the perceived loss of core values, cultural norms, and identities that are associated with higher levels of immigration and refugee resettlement (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014; Newman et al., 2012). In short, native-born individuals of the dominant cultural group, especially those holding an ethnocultural view of national identity, are expected to exhibit negative attitudes towards immigrants and refugees as these out-groups are viewed as culturally threatening.

Summarizing the common “threats” that have been identified in the literature, Harell et al. (2012, p. 501) write that the threat “can be (a) economic, that is taking away jobs from natives or being an economic drain on the welfare system, or (b) cultural, that is, culturally religiously or ethically distinct groups that threaten the identity of the dominant group.” While cultural and economic threats are the most common forms of threat examined in the literature, we explore a third relevant threat associated with immigrants and refugees that, to date, has been less well studied in the literature. We refer to this as criminal threat—the perception, or stereotype, that refugees are criminals (even terrorists in some extreme cases) and therefore pose a physical threat to society (Landmann et al., 2019, label this “safety” threat).

There is an emerging body of literature linking concerns of crime and terrorism to anti-migrant attitudes and intergroup conflict. Hanes and Machin (2014), for example, found that significant increases in hate crimes against both Asians and Arabs occurred almost immediately after the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks. Frey (2020) reports similar results regarding the 2015 sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany. These studies, however, tend to rely on aggregate trends and link crime and terrorism to anti-migrant outcomes at the macro-level. Less work has linked individual-level fear of crime to anti-migrant attitudes. With that said, survey data from Europe have indicated that nearly one in three Europeans view refugees as more to blame for crime than other groups (Wike et al., 2016). Consistent with limited but emerging research on the subject (Boateng, McCann et al., 2021; De Coninck, 2022; Hermanni & Neumann, 2019; Landmann et al., 2019), we hypothesize that individuals who are more fearful of crime will express more negative views about refugees.

The study of fear of crime has a long history in disciplines such as psychology, criminology, and sociology. The literature reveals that people who are afraid of being criminally victimized tend to change their attitudes and behaviours as a result. Fear of crime has therefore been linked to a variety of problematic attitudes and behaviours including support for increased punitiveness and less liberal penal policies (Hale, 1996), a fractured sense of community (Wilson, 1975), and feelings of anxiety and mistrust of others (Liska et al., 1982). Box et al. (1988, p. 341), for instance, noted that “because of its intrinsically disturbing nature and its adverse consequences for the quality of community life, fear of crime has become a major social problem.” Expanding on these insights, our study focuses on the implications of fear of crime in shaping negative sentiments towards refugees and, by extension, broader attitudes regarding refugee policy.

Today’s prevalent associations of criminality and illegality with refugees appear with increased frequency in contemporary media and might seem to be constant features of public discourse. However, stereotypes of refugees have undergone significant transformations since the postwar creation of the international refugee regime, shifts that have had important consequences for international protection. It is important to recall that through much of the Cold War period, refugees arriving in the West were often represented in idealized terms as “political heroes and courageous defenders of democracy” (Pupavac, 2008, p. 273). This predominant stereotypical image of the “political” refugee was associated with individuals resisting, and in flight from, repressive regimes. Popular depictions of refugees commonly invoked the “heroic male figure fighting against the terrors of communism” and portrayed arriving refugees in positive terms, as representing “an asset to western society” (Walaardt, 2013, p. 76). Although individual motives of those seeking asylum certainly varied, refugees were generally believed to hold firmly anti-communist attitudes. Their assumed ideological affinity and subsequent flight in search of asylum was by extension often explicitly understood as an endorsement of the superiority of Western societies (Keely, 2001, p. 307). The positive public reception and favourable treatment of refugees was linked to their framing in a larger geopolitical situation.3

Contemporary stereotypes of refugees are the result of a gradual shift to more complex and variegated representations since the end of the Cold War. Migration studies scholars have identified this moment as a critical juncture in the asylum and refugee policies of Western states: the basis of interest in welcoming refugees disappeared as they lost their ideological or geopolitical value in a changed global context (Chimni, 1993, p. 443). Concurrently, this period saw a significant shift in popular opinion for the adoption of far more restrictive asylum policies alongside increased expressions of public anxiety regarding the “new refugees” that characterized the growing numbers of globally displaced persons (Mertus, 1998). Notably, these developments of post–Cold War paradigmatic change also emerged against the backdrop of broader shifts in both the flow and reception of the “new asylum seekers” to Global North states, including Canada, given that “refugees from the South were now making their way to the North” (Chimni, 2004). In this context, the previously prevailing “heroic” archetype of the refugee has largely been eclipsed by a more dualistic set of stereotypes that represent refugees in either sympathetic or pejorative terms.

Common sympathetic representations centre on the figure of the “deserving” refugee, a designation reserved for those framed as “genuine” victims in need of humanitarian help (Lawlor & Paquet, 2022). This image of the refugee as a passive and needy victim tends to be inflected through a humanitarian frame, one often exemplified in appeals by international organizations to provide assistance or in media portrayals emphasizing the harrowing and traumatic personal experiences of those displaced by conflict. More recently, scholars have analyzed the emerging trope of the “ideal” refugee, understood in terms of resilience and entrepreneurship (Krause & Schmidt, 2020) or as exemplifying economic integration and societal contributions associated with “good” immigrants (Haw, 2020). The trope of refugee as victim has recently become more prominent in Western public discourse, including in Canada. In contrast, today’s negative stereotypes of refugees tend to rely on pejorative and politically polarizing figures framed as threatening, undeserving, and deviant. Popular portrayals of refugee claimants in both the media and broader public discourse often describe them as queue-jumpers and bogus refugees, recasting individuals as economic migrants exploiting asylum systems in order to illicitly take advantage of social welfare provisions or “steal” jobs from citizens. More explicitly menacing depictions of refugees represent them as dangerous criminals or terrorist infiltrators who pose a fundamental threat to national security.

Undertones of illegality loom large across dominant negative stereotypes. Particular opprobrium is frequently directed at those arriving through irregular means to claim asylum. In discussing the reception of “boat people,” Mannik (2012, p. 264) goes so far as to suggest that as a group, “they are considered the least deserving and the most threatening of all refugees” and that their unsanctioned entry is “generally described as a criminal assault on the nation.” At the same time, however, contemporary public discourse reveals that the stereotype of refugees as a violent criminal threat has taken on general significance, extending to refugees as a whole. Paradigmatic cases include labelling refugees as terrorists, sexual predators, and members of organized crime networks by far-right political parties in Europe and elected officials in the United States. In the latter case, pejorative stereotypes of refugees as threats to society have been effectively translated into a suite of policies with profound impacts on global refugee resettlement capacity and access to asylum (Beers, 2020; Pierce & Bolter, 2020; Pierce et al., 2018).

Notably, research on the purported link of refugees and crime in Germany, the largest recipient of refugees across Europe during the EU refugee “crisis” of 2015, highlights the paradox of citizens perceiving sharply increased crime in a context of actually declining crime rates (Feltes et al., 2018). Moreover, scholarship on the US case provides compelling evidence for the lack of a relationship between suppressed refugee resettlement and reduced crime (Amuedo-Dorantes et al., 2021; Masterson & Yasenov, 2021). These realities have done little to diminish the ongoing circulation of stereotypes tying refugees to criminality, including in countries such as Canada, where even generally pro-refugee sentiments are viewed as predominant in public discourse. This is the case despite past evidence that crime rates among newcomers, whether immigrants or refugees, are typically no higher than among native-born nationals across most Western states (Bucerius, 2011). Indeed, Kivimäki and Nicholson (2021, p. 1749) argue that influxes of refugees “have not been found to increase the number of crimes in host countries” and note that the statistical relation between refugees and the development of crime is weak. In the Canadian context, reports suggest that less than 1% (0.3%) of irregular migrants have a “serious criminal past” (Hill, 2019).

The fact that refugees do not engage in more criminal activity than others is not particularly relevant for our study. The stereotyping of refugees as criminals creates a perception of a realistic threat. As Stephan et al. (2015, p. 257) have written, “when the negative stereotypes concern the potential for actual harm to the ingroup (e.g., aggressiveness, deviousness), they may be thought of as realistic threats.” The criminal threat that refugees offer is real, not because it is based in empirical reality (it is not) but because the stereotype is so widespread and prevalent that the public views it as a realistic threat. The salience of this linkage is especially significant given that the refugee and asylum policies of liberal democratic states, such as Canada, are directly informed by their voting publics. In the remainder of this paper, we therefore explore the possibility that fear of crime is a predictor of anti-refugee sentiments.

To study whether fear of crime is an important predictor of anti-refugee sentiments, we made use of a large survey of voting-aged Canadians (N = 2,551). Participants were recruited from Qualtrics’ survey panels (an online, non-probability sample) and were asked to complete a 25-minute survey. Historically, probability samples were viewed as the gold standard for survey research. As Baker et al. (2013) have noted, however, modern probability samples often have “less than ideal conditions”: namely, low coverage and high non-response rates (see Curtin et al., 2005; Lavrakas et al., 2007; Sala & Lillini, 2015). Although online non-probability samples have their own challenges—especially around data quality, respondent fatigue, and representativeness—several studies have demonstrated that different survey modes tend to produce remarkably similar results and estimates (Ansolabehere & Schaffner, 2014; Breton et al., 2017; Bytzek & Bieber, 2016; Stephenson & Crête, 2011). Similar to the approach adopted by recent Canadian election studies, recruitment to our survey mitigated some of the challenges of online non-probability samples by including quotas for participant sex, age, and income that were designed to make the final pool of participants more reflective of Canadian society.

The survey included numerous blocks of questions. The first block asked participants about their background (age, sex, etc.). The second block asked about participants’ political attitudes and behaviours. Finally, the survey ended with a number of personality batteries. The survey includes 2,551 respondents (Mage = 47.2, SD = 16.4), with an even split between men (50%) and women (49%; 1% gender non-binary). Approximately one quarter (22%) of respondents identified as non-white (either as members of a visible minority community or as persons of Indigenous heritage). The survey received ethics approval from Carleton University and was completed online in summer 2019.

Included in the survey were four items regarding perceptions of refugees in Canada that were adapted from recent public opinion surveys (e.g., Environics Institute for Survey Research, 2018b). The items had acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.75), and therefore, we created a single scale of (anti-)refugee attitudes as the outcome variable of interest for this article (see also Pruysers, 2020; Pruysers & Schminke, 2024). The items used to create the final variable asked respondents, “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?” The statements were: “Most people claiming to be refugees are not real refugees”; “Canada should do more to help refugees” (reverse coded); “People coming to Canada claiming to be refugees are imposing a severe strain on our welfare system”; and “Being a refugee is a choice—a person’s circumstances aren’t to blame.” The variable is coded such that higher values signify more negative views about refugees. A confirmatory factor analysis (Figure 1) revealed a suitable one-factor solution (i.e., no loadings below .40; Stevens, 1996) and showed acceptable model fit. While a significant chi-square value suggests a poor fit, this is not uncommon with large data sets. Other measures of fit such as comparative fit index (CFI; 0.963), Tucker–Lewis index (TLI; 0.899), and the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR; 0.039) were all within acceptable ranges (see Pituch & Stevens, 2016). Exploratory factor analysis revealed only one underlying factor (eigenvalue: 2.32, explaining 58% of the total variance). Total variance explained was well within the accepted range (Pallant, 2016).

The primary explanatory variables considered in this paper focus on fear of crime. Here we include three crime-oriented variables that allow us to tap into the extent to which respondents were fearful of crime: “Crime is a serious problem where I live” (0–6 scale); “How fearful are you of being the victim of future crime?” (10-point scale); and “Have you, or someone close to you, ever been the victim of crime?” (dichotomous). In addition, we include two broad categories of controls: variables related to socio-demographics on the one hand and politically oriented variables on the other. Our socio-demographic variables included a range of potential covariates, including sex, age, educational attainment, household income,4

and labour market position, as well as variables capturing whether the participant was a member of a visible minority community or was foreign-born. For politically oriented variables, we included left–right ideology (0–10, where 10 is right), party identification, political interest, political knowledge,5

and two variables related to offline and online news consumption (days per week consumed). Including this robust set of controls allowed us to capture alternative explanations that have found support in the literature.

How do Canadians feel about refugees and is this related to their fear and concern for crime? Descriptive statistics for each of the individual items that make up the outcome can be found in Table 1. For presentation purposes, the “strongly” and “somewhat” categories have been collapsed so that there are three categories: disagree (strongly and somewhat), neither agree nor disagree, and agree (strongly and somewhat). The responses indicate that a sizeable minority of respondents hold negative views about refugees. Three in ten, for example, thought that a majority of individuals claiming to be refugees were not “real” refugees. At the same time, half of all respondents thought that refugees represented a “severe” strain on the country’s welfare safety net. Overall, and while there was variation, a considerable minority of Canadian respondents clearly hold negative views of refugees.

Before turning to the multivariate model, it is worth briefly considering the bivariate correlations between our refugee scale and the three crime-oriented variables. Both general fear of crime/victimization and perceptions that crime is a serious problem in one’s own neighbourhood were significantly correlated to anti-refugee attitudes (p < .01). Diverging somewhat from these results, past victimization was only marginally correlated to anti-refugee sentiments (p < .10). Although the results differ slightly across the three variables, the simple bivariate correlations provide preliminary evidence that attitudes regarding crime are indeed associated with feelings towards refugees. In short, those who were fearful and concerned about crime tended to express less positive views of refugees. Next, we consider whether this pattern continues to hold when accounting for other known correlates of anti-refugee attitudes.

Turning to the multivariate analysis, Table 2 provides the results of a series of ordinary least square linear regressions where the dependent variable is the degree to which respondents endorsed the items of our anti-refugee scale. The analysis includes three different model specifications. In Model 1, we include our socio-demographic control variables: sex, age, employment status, foreign-born, visible minority status, income, and education. Model 2 adds our politically oriented variables, including party identification (Conservative, New Democrat, Green, and other/no party, with Liberal as the reference category), left–right self-placement on the ideological spectrum, political interest, political knowledge, and news media consumption. Model 3 then adds our attitudes about crime and reports the full results. Recall that crime variables included past victimization, fear of crime, and perception of crime in one’s own neighbourhood.

Beginning with Model 1, we found that several socio-demographic variables were associated with anti-refugee sentiments. Older individuals and men, for example, expressed significantly more negative views towards refugees. Those with higher levels of education, by contrast, expressed significantly more positive views towards refugees. These findings are consistent with social psychology evidence regarding bias and prejudice (Akrami et al., 2000; Gonsalkorale et al., 2009). Perhaps surprisingly, employment status, which can be viewed as a proxy for economic threat, was unrelated to sentiments towards refugees in the sample. The visible minority and foreign-born variables also provided an interesting pattern. Not only were white Canadians no more likely to express anti-refugee sentiments than members of a visible minority, but foreign-born Canadians were actually more likely to hold anti-refugee attitudes than Canadian-born respondents.

Model 2 added our politically oriented variables to the socio-demographics presented in Model 1. The pattern remained largely stable, with men and older individuals expressing more negative attitudes, and higher-educated individuals expressing more positive views. The politically oriented variables showed a number of statistically significant relationships, all in the expected direction. Compared to Liberal partisans (the reference category), Conservatives were more likely to endorse anti-refugee sentiments. Given this relationship, it is not surprising that being further right on the left–right ideological spectrum is also related to more negative attitudes towards refugees. In this regard, Model 2 is consistent with the literature and provides clear empirical support for the assertion that ideology and partisanship are crucial correlates of anti-refugee sentiments (Gravelle, 2016; Williams et al., 2022). We also found that political interest and knowledge were negatively related to anti-refugee sentiments; those who expressed higher levels of political interest and those who scored higher on political knowledge questions were more likely to express more positive views towards refugees. Evidence suggests that individuals who overestimate the number of refugees/asylum seekers coming to Canada each year tend to express more negative views about refugees (Paquet & Lawlor, 2022). Our knowledge and interest variables captured a similar pattern, where highly interested and knowledgeable individuals were likely better able to understand the migration landscape. Interestingly, Model 2 provides no evidence that level of news media consumption (either online or offline) is related to anti-refugee sentiments. While perhaps counterintuitive, this is consistent with Paquet and Lawlor (2022), who reported that print, tabloid, and social media usage are all unrelated to negative perceptions of refugees in Canada.

Model 3 added to the results by including three variables related to perceptions of crime and criminal vulnerability. Given popular narratives regarding refugees as criminals and potential terrorists (Haynes et al., 2004; Ng et al., 2019), we expected those fearful of crime and victimization to express more critical views of refugees. This is precisely what we found. Two of these variables—perceiving crime as a problem in one’s neighbourhood and fear of crime more generally—were significantly related to more negative views of refugees. Consistent with the bivariate results, past victimization reveals only a marginally significant relationship to negative attitudes regarding refugees (p < .10). The general patterns reported here support our criminal threat hypothesis and are similar to those identified in Europe, which have linked fear of terrorism (De Coninck, 2022) and fear of crime (Hermanni & Neumann, 2019; Landmann et al., 2019) to more negative perceptions of refugees and asylum seekers. Moreover, the R2 value of each model specification reveals that each block of variables adds incrementally to the total variance explained and therefore improves our understanding of who holds anti-refugee sentiments. Model 1 (socio-demographics only) explains less than 3% of the variance, while Model 2, which added our political variables, explains 20%. Adding the crime variables in Model 3 increased our total variance explained yet again and resulted in a R2 value of 24%.6

To better assess the substantive impact of our fear of crime variables, we conducted a dominance analysis. As Lee and Dahinten (2021, p. 2) explain, “dominance analysis, which identifies predictors’ relative importance in a statistical model, can be used to supplement regression analysis.” The standardized dominance value (second last column of Table 2) indicates the calculated proportion that each predictor in the model contributes to the explained variance (totalling 100%). The rank value (final column of Table 2), by contrast, simply shows the rank of each predictor, with 1 representing the most important variable in our model and 19 being the least important. As shown, fear of crime and feelings that crime is a significant problem in one’s neighbourhood were ranked fifth and third, respectively. These variables were only outperformed by ideology, partisanship, and political interest in their explanatory power. This suggests that fear of crime is an important piece of the explanatory puzzle that should not be overlooked.

Overall, then, Model 3 revealed that older individuals, men, Conservatives (partisans and ideologically), those fearful of crime, and those who perceived crime as a significant issue in their neighbourhood all held markedly more negative attitudes towards refugees. In contrast, those with higher levels of education and those who expressed higher levels of political interest tended to express significantly less negative attitudes. Note that the final model includes a number of related variables that might cause concerns of multicollinearity (i.e., three variables related to crime, partisanship and ideology, etc.). Multicollinearity diagnostics were conducted, and all variance inflation factor (VIF) and tolerance statistics were well-within the acceptable range (i.e., no VIF values > 1.5).

This study investigated the relationship between fear of crime and perceptions of refugees among a large sample of voting-aged Canadians. While recent scholarship has put forward a variety of explanations for anti-migrant sentiments, including perceptions of the level of migration to Canada (Paquet & Lawlor, 2022), partisanship/ideology (Gravelle, 2016; Williams et al., 2022), individual differences in personality (Pruysers, 2020), cues of deservingness (Lawlor & Paquet, 2022), and intergroup contact (Gravelle, 2018), the role of fear of crime remains understudied in the Canadian context. Building on ITT, and consistent with extant comparative literature on the subject, we found that fear of crime is indeed a consistent predictor of anti-refugee attitudes. Importantly, this relationship held even when incorporating controls for other factors including age, sex, visible minority status, education, income, employment status, political orientation, party identification, and political interest. Those who were fearful of crime and those who thought crime was a growing problem in their neighbourhood reported significantly less positive perceptions of refugees. Moreover, the dominance analysis revealed that fear of crime and perceptions of crime as a problem, and not actual victimization, are important in understanding anti-refugee sentiments. The fact that personal experience with victimization was the least important crime variable likely speaks to the fact that immigrants and refugees do not actually commit crimes at higher rates (Boateng, Pryce & Chenane, 2021), despite common media portrayals (Lawlor & Tolley, 2017) and mass perceptions (Wike et al., 2016).

What accounts for the relationship between fear of crime and anti-refugee sentiments, especially in the absence of empirical evidence demonstrating a connection between refugees and criminality? While more work is needed, our findings may imply the role of framing in informing this linkage. The pervasive impact of mass media in shaping public opinion and societal attitudes in liberal democratic states is widely recognized. In this context, prior work on perceptions of refugees has emphasized the role that news media plays not only in framing government policy and public discourse but in constructing and advancing specific positions on these issues (Esses et al., 2013). Studies analyzing both textual and visual representations of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, across a variety of liberal democratic states, provide ample evidence of negative media framings and the role of the press in the discursive construction of these out-groups as societal threats (Esses et al., 2013; Farris & Silber Mohamed, 2018; Klocker & Dunn, 2003; Kosho, 2016; Silber Mohamed & Farris, 2020). While recent analysis of the Canadian context has emphasized a shift to a more humanizing portrayal in print coverage surrounding the Syrian refugee crisis (Wallace, 2018), this contrasts with earlier studies that identified similar trends in negative media framings of refugees in Canada (Esses et al., 2013; Lawlor & Tolley, 2017).

Importantly, however, media outlets and journalists do not act in isolation. Prior research has also drawn attention to the role of government officials in reinforcing negative stereotypes of refugees as a societal threat (Klocker & Dunn, 2003; Reynolds & Hyndman, 2021; van Dijk, 2015). More recent examples from both the US and UK furnish cases of political elites using platforms afforded by public office to frame refugees and asylum seekers as criminals or terrorists; these framings are then mobilized to justify harsh and restrictive policies. Recent work on Canada has illustrated the role of the current Liberal government in advancing a positive narrative of refugees to justify its resettlement policy, one coupled with an emphasis on the integrity and safety of these programs (Garcea & Kikulwe, 2019). However, as we noted at the beginning of this paper, the Trudeau government has also adopted policy positions that arguably reinforce associations between asylum seekers and criminality and that may reinforce the idea that some refugees are more deserving than others. For example, the imposition of various forms of “extreme vetting” and application of limited admissions of individuals originating from specific areas in the Global South that have been framed as threatening or dangerous in public discourse, when compared to the significantly more generous and less visibly securitized reception of significantly greater admissions of individuals under these programs from those now coded as part of the Global North (Khaki et al., 2024; Pardy, 2023), may both reflect and contribute to the relationship that we examine in this study. The broader import of government messaging, whether in the form of official policy announcements or press releases, in framing public perceptions of refugees continues to merit further attention both in Canada and beyond.

The focus of this research is also related to work at the intersection of law and refugee policy. Although criminal law and migration law have traditionally been treated as distinct domains, scholars have pointed to a growing convergence between these areas (Garcia Hernandez, 2017; Stumpf, 2014). The phenomenon of crimmigration—broadly understood in terms of the criminalization of migration and asylum—can be found across Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States, which have increasingly normalized practices such as immigration detention or the application of other criminal sanctions (Atak & Simeon, 2018; Billings, 2019; Garcia Hernandez, 2015; Parkin, 2013). The impact of this convergence has been particularly acute for refugees seeking protection given the narrowing of safe and regular pathways to claim asylum, and the reality that the focus of these developments has been on irregular migration (McDonnell & Merton, 2019). Our findings complement existing work on the impacts of crimmigration on refugee protection by shedding light on why such policies have appeared to command a significant degree of popular support.

Our findings also suggest a number of future avenues for research. First, although our analysis is based on a robust, cross-national sample, the focus on a single case at a single time point raises valid questions about the generalizability of these results. Replication of this work and further analyses of “criminal threat” in the Canadian context are therefore needed. Second, while our results are limited to refugees, future work may consider how fear of crime is associated with attitudes about immigration more broadly in the Canadian context. This is especially important given that research suggests that attitudes towards immigrants and refugees are not always identical (Paquet & Lawlor, 2022). Third, a large literature, both in Canada and comparatively, suggests that perceptions of deservingness play an important role in shaping attitudes towards immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (De Coninck et al., 2022; Lawlor & Paquet, 2022; Newman et al., 2015; Nielsen et al., 2020). Understanding if, and how, deservingness mediates the relationship between fear of crime and migrant attitudes is worthwhile. Finally, as noted earlier in our account of contemporary stereotypes of refugees, popular representations of refugees as criminals are a relatively recent phenomenon. Although this lies well beyond the scope of this study, the apparently historically mutable character of such stereotypes may support the hypothesis that the broader construction of refugees as a threating out-group could be driven by framing effects. At very least, the results emphasize the importance of dispelling the common myth that refugees are a criminal threat.

None declared.

This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.