From “immigrant” to “illegal”: Contrary to populist rhetoric, newcomers still commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens

In 2025, an attempt to seek asylum in the United States ended in prison back home for 34-year-old Russian activist Leonid Melekhin. In July he was deported to Russia, where he was taken straight from the airport to a pretrial detention center in Perm. Melekhin had spent nearly ten months in a U.S. migrant detention facility awaiting the review of his asylum application, only to be denied. In Russia, he was charged with “justifying terrorism” over a post on his Telegram channel.

Such stories are becoming increasingly common — not only in the United States, but around the world. According to the United Nations, the number of displaced people has reached 123 million — twice as many as during the Second World War. Meanwhile, right-wing politicians in the U.S. and Europe continue to label migrants as “criminals” or “illegals,” describing their arrival as an “invasion.”

The invention of illegality

The very concept of “illegal immigration” emerged just over a century ago. Historian Mae Ngai, in her book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, notes that the term began to see widespread use in the United States in the 1920s following the introduction of immigration quotas. Before that, restrictions on migration were minimal and largely just limited newcomers’ rights to vote and participate in formal political life. But alongside quotas came new “categories of exclusion” — factors that could serve as grounds for denying entry. Immigration from Asia was completely banned, while access for Eastern Europeans, especially Catholics and Jews, was severely restricted.

With the introduction of quotas, the share of foreign-born residents in the U.S. population began a decades-long downward trend. In 1920, immigrants made up 13.2% of the country’s residents; by the 1970s, that figure had dropped to 4.7%.

Undocumented migrants do not cause crime to rise

The terms “illegal” and “outsider” dehumanize migrants, framing them as a threat rather than as rights-bearing individuals, notes linguist Teun van Dijk. Sociologists René Flores and Ariela Schachter have found that the label “illegal” also carries racial prejudice: people tend to associate it with non-white and poor migrants, regardless of their actual legal status. At the same time, white foreigners are far more often described by the media and society with the positively shaded term “expat.”