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Immigrants are routinely tied to a range of social problems in the policy making process in the US political system. Little is known however about the extent to which citizens hold attitudes that connect immigrants to particular social problems and whether these attitudes spill over to influence citizens' preferences toward specific public policy alternatives that might appear to be largely independent of immigrants and immigration. Investigating the nexus between immigration and crime, we ask how Anglo whites' contextual environments influence their propensity to link immigrants to a salient social pathology like crime. Results show that whites living in states where immigrant populations have increased most dramatically and in states with lower socioeconomic characteristics are more likely to associate immigration with increased criminal activity. Whites' attitudes toward immigration-induced crime has important spillover implications to the larger public policy making process as whites who view immigrants as a cause of criminal activity are more likely to support tougher criminal sentencing and the death penalty.The study of public attitudes toward immigration is often carried out quite independently of research on public attitudes regarding other policy issues despite the fact that in the world of practical politics and public debate, views about immigrants and immigration might significantly influence preferences toward other salient but only tangentially related public policy issues. While it is important to examine immigration as a singular issue, this narrow focus severely limits our understanding of the extent to which citizens connect immigrants and immigration to the broader spectrum of public issues within the larger context of public policymaking. As the United States becomes increasingly racially and ethnically diverse as a result of both legal and illegal immigration it is important to begin to advance our understanding of the impact that immigration has on the larger public policy making process above and beyond the narrow confines of ''border-related'' issues. Recent political history tells us for example that the public makes connections between immigrants and a variety of social and economic problems above and beyond those that are traditionally associated with border issues (Smith and Edmonston, 1998). For instance, in 1994 California citizens placed

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