Exploring Immigration, Crime and Terrorism in the United States through Wikipedia

Introduction

Immigration has always been a controversial issue. However, the issue has especially come under fire during the past couple of years, since the election of President Trump in 2016. Trump has been criticized for unnecessarily increasing insecurity among the American people by labelling immigrants as criminals and terrorists and pushing immigration reform as a national security concern. From his campaign ads to his executive orders, all seem to target immigrants for being unwanted pests who hurt the safety, both economic and physical, of the good hardworking American citizen. However, did this narrative of immigrants as criminals and terrorists really start with Trump or did it exist in the administrations of other presidents as well? That’s what this website aims to find out.

This website explores the roots of the relationship between immigrants, crime and terrorism. Using new and old information extracted from Wikipedia pages, I tried to understand when and why we started viewing asylum seekers, refugees or illegal immigrants as criminals and terrorists who pose a threat to our national security. I trace the development of this narrative over time by analyzing histories and revisions of Wikipedia pages. The Wikipedia pages I explore were carefully selected to include the immigration acts and laws passed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barrack Obama and Donald Trump. Along with that, the extensive list of pages also includes events that influenced the creation of these laws, such as the September 11 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center Bombings. Lastly, the list consists of some general pages related to Immigration in the United States as well as pages for countries with high or controversial immigration to the United States like Mexico and Syria.

Key Observations

First Stage of Immigration Reform: The Clinton Presidency

When I started my exploration, I expected the fear of immigrants to go back as far as the September 11 attacks considering all the perpetrators of the attacks were non-citizens who were in the United States legally or illegally. However, I did not expect it to date back to the 1990s which is in fact when the relationship started being formally established in law. The page Golden Venture offers some insight into this. The page is about a cargo ship that smuggled people from China into the United States in 1993. Most of the people were asylum seekers who were incarcerated upon arrival. Further insight is offered by the page Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. This act was the first formal link between criminal activity and immigrants that was established in law. Some of the top words on the page include, or have included in the past, words like ‘jail’, ‘offenses’ and ‘deportation’. These words showcase a perspective of immigrants as criminals that was starting to develop after the Golden Venture incident and the 1993 World Trade Center Bombings.

Aftermath of 9/11: The Bush Presidency

It can be argued that no event in recent American history has had a greater impact on US immigration policy than the September 11 attacks. The devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon completely changed the way the US government addressed immigration. In response to the attacks, George Bush declared a War on Terror. The war, while mostly supported in the years after 2001, began to be more widely criticized towards the end of the Bush administration. This shift can be observed through an analysis of the Wikipedia page on the War on Terrorism. Two of the top words on the page between 2001 and 2004 were ‘evil’ and ‘combatants’. Then later in 2005, ‘evil’ and ‘combatants’ both went off the list and words like ‘torture’ became top words instead. Along with that, a section header for ‘Casualties’ was added in 2006. A ‘Costs’ section was also added in 2012. It’s interesting to note here that as the perspective towards the War on Terrorism shifted among Americans, the information on the Wikipedia page also changed to represent this shift.

Changes like these are noticeable on other pages as well; for instance, on the page for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Immediately after 9/11, as part of the War on Terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security was established and new agencies to control immigration were created. One of these agencies was the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP. From 2001 till 2006, the first paragraph on the Wikipedia page for CBP read –

“… (CBP) part of the United States Department of Homeland Security, is charged with preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States. CBP also is responsible for apprehending individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally, stemming the flow of illegal drugs and other contraband; protecting our agricultural and economic interests from harmful pests and diseases; protecting American businesses from theft of their intellectual property; and regulating and facilitating international trade, collecting import duties, and enforcing U.S. trade laws”

This paragraph shows us an image of illegal immigrants as “terrorists” and “harmful pests and diseases” – an image that was in the minds of Americans in 2001, long before Donald Trump came to power. In 2007, the page and the paragraph were revised to be less aggressive and more encyclopedic. The revision, while partly due to a shift in the American perspective at the end of the Bush administration, might have also been due to an overall improvement in Wikipedia’s information creation and editing.

The War on Terrorism also saw the establishment of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Both were established in 2002 to prevent and counter terrorist activity by illegal or legal aliens. The former was a system of registration that kept track of non-citizens at all times; while the latter was a prison established in Guantanamo to detain potential suspects of terrorism. The Wikipedia pages for these also reflect changes similar to the ones discussed above. A section for ‘Criticism’ was added on the NEESERS page in 2004 and on the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp page in 2009. Along with that, ‘torture’ became a top word on the latter in 2008 – around the time Barrack Obama was elected president.

Deportations and D.A.C.A.: The Obama Presidency

While the Bush administration was marked by major legal immigration reforms, the first few years of Obama’s presidency saw the largest number of deportations in American history. In 2012, which was the peak year for deportations under Obama, 34,000 people per month were forcibly removed from the US; this number has been notably lower, albeit random, during the Trump administration. However, interestingly enough, there is little mention of these removals under Obama in the Wikipedia pages that I explored. Even the page for the agency responsible for deportations didn’t talk much about them during the Obama years. The page being referred to here is the page for ICE – the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

ICE was another one of the agencies created in response to the September 11 attacks. The self-described aim of the agency is to “investigate criminal and terrorist activity of foreign nationals residing in the United States”. Looking at the revisions of the page, we notice that despite the high rate of deportation, ‘deportation’ or ‘removal’ weren’t top words on the page throughout the Obama administration; ‘deportation’ was, however, a top word this year (2018). Another interesting thing to note on the ICE page is that ‘Criticism’ as a section header existed on the page until 2008. It was then removed in 2009 and added back again in 2018 – a year marked by arbitrary deportations of illegal aliens ordered by Trump.

Despite the low media attention, the large number of removals during the Obama years were eventually noticed by the public and immigration activists. Protests and backlash from them prompted Obama to shift his immigration policy in the second term of his presidency. After 2013, he passed acts that would come to define his administration’s immigration policy. These include the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans act, and the Central American Minors Program. All of these pro-immigration acts aided illegal immigrants and overshadowed the Obama ordered ICE deportations. As a result, the public, and as we can see, Wikipedia, don’t associate Obama with anti-immigration administration policies; however, if we look at the top words on the page Immigration Policy of Donald Trump, we notice that one of the top words is ‘deportations’.

Muslim Ban and Border Wall: The Trump Presidency

Donald Trump’s administration has been riddled with anti-immigrant rhetoric. Through his executive orders and policy changes, Trump has time and again, very publicly denounced immigrants as menacing criminals and terrorists. However, while there were noteworthy observations to be made on the immigration policy pages of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, there was not much of interest in pages related to Trump’s immigration policy. Unlike those of the other presidents, Trump’s immigration policy pages are relatively new; therefore, it’s difficult to detect patterns that are only observable over time. Additionally, unlike the presidencies of the others, particularly Obama’s, Trump’s administration has been very vocal about its ‘immigrants are harmful’ political stance. This makes it unnecessary for us to search for subtleties.

For instance, a prominent goal of Trump’s administration has been to secure the US borders from infiltration by unwanted criminals along the US-Mexico border. The United States Border Patrol is one of the agencies responsible for this task. Their mission, as found on the first paragraph of their Wikipedia page, is to “detect and prevent illegal aliens, terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States”. It’s simply yet another example of an agency that perpetuates the management of immigration as a security concern. Other pages like these include the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement page and the United States border security concerns page. The former here is a government agency created by Donald Trump for the victims of immigration crime and the latter is a page on border security, almost written like a personal or reflective essay; it reflects on some of the border security concerns that it claims, plague the United States. Interestingly, factual and objective information is almost entirely missing on the page.

Conclusions

Through the exploration of the selected Wikipedia pages, it is evident that the narrowing view of immigrants as security threats has been forming since the 1990s. From the Golden Venture and the immigration acts of 1996 to the agencies created after 9/11 and Obama’s deportation policy of “Felons, not families”, all have played a role in creating the conditions that we see under Trump today. However, one thing to note here is that, this negative perspective towards immigration is not evident in how the corpus of pages I picked relate with each other or how they cluster together; it’s only evident in the page revision histories and the pages themselves. There are some interesting similarities between pages; for instance, the page on the Transportation Security Authority of the US has similar wording as the page Islamophobia in the United States. However, these similarities between pages are not significant enough to be considered. This is something that might be addressed by selecting pages that are internally linked to each other and studying those links. In the meantime, the development of this narrative can be clearly traced within individual Wikipedia pages and their revision histories, as I have done above.

One of the most important conclusions I drew from this research project is about the quality of information available on Wikipedia. Since its foundation, Wikipedia has laid significant emphasis on one its core values and policies – the Neutral Point of View Policy. This policy states that –

“Wikipedia must not take sides. All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article.”

Over the years, Wikipedia has worked hard to ensure this policy is followed by all community editors. For some controversial pages, it has even restricted editing to only certified editors who have been verified and deemed eligible to be neutral. As a result, Wikipedia has come a long way in being objective. If we look at some of its earlier revisions, bias is evident. For instance, in 2001, the first paragraph of the page on Pakistan described the country as mostly illiterate and poor with widespread child labor. Whereas now, the first paragraph on the page simply describes the geographical location of the country. However, despite this significant progress in consistency and objectivity, prejudice comes through on Wikipedia. Albeit in more subtle ways, bias, conservative and liberal, can be found on several pages, at least in the ones we studied above.

References

Angry that ICE is ripping families apart? Don’t just blame Trump. Blame Clinton, Bush and Obama, too, The Washington Post
Donald Trump is deporting fewer people than Barack Obama did, The Economist