From 1990 to 2010, the percentage of foreign-born individuals in the United States population has skyrocketed from 7.9% or (19,767,316 individuals) to 12.9% of the population (or 39,955,854 individuals), and has received attention from researchers seeking to examine the link between immigration and decisions made by government representatives and officials (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014, p. 58). In the article “Unwarranted Disparity in Federal Sentencing: Noncitizen Crime as a Social/Group Threat”, Jawjeong Wu and Jill M. D’Angelo broadened the scope of this field by being the first researchers to look into citizenship as a factor using multilevel analysis (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014, p. 59). In their study, Wu and D’Angelo (2014) found that cross-level …show more content…
58). To this end, the article outlined six hypotheses to be tested. Hypothesis one postulated that among different federal district courts, sentence length would vary remarkably (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014). The second hypothesis proposed that citizen offenders would receive longer prison terms in their sentences (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014). Additionally, their third hypothesis conjectured that large non-citizen populations would correlate with lengthier prison terms for all offenders, regardless of citizenship status (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014). Following up on the third hypothesis, hypothesis four stated that federal districts with a large non-citizen population would result in longer prison terms for non-citizen offenders than districts with a much smaller non-citizen population (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014). Within the fifth hypothesis, it was suggested that prison sentences would lengthen based on four components: large racial or ethnic minorities, high crime rates, light caseload, and low average personal income (Wu and D’Angelo, 2014). The sixth and final hypothesis postulated that the outcome of hypothesis three would