Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—criminal, achievement, struggle-oriented—impact cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of “immigrants” in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a white/non-white axis: Germany clustered with Russia, Syria with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration policy preferences: achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, criminal narratives for more.
