"Bad hombres" at the Southern US border?: White nationalism and the perceived dangerousness of immigrants

As a candidate and as president, Donald Trump heightened the salience of immigration, portraying those crossing the nation's Southern border as "bad hombres" and advocating building a wall blocking their access to the United States from Mexico. Based on a 2019 MTurk study of 465 White adults, the current study found that a clear majority of respondents rejected this stereotype of Southern immigrants as "bad hombres," judging them to be just as law-abiding as Americans. Importantly, however, the analysis revealed that two innovative measures - Hispanic resentment and, in particular, White nationalism - were consistently related to perceptions of immigrants as criminogenic. Given the growing demographic diversity of the United States, future research should consider the increasing influence of racial/ethnic resentment and White group identity on public opinions about immigration and other justice issues.