Mental representations of immigrants encode racialized expectations of socio-structural positions

Illegalized immigrants are mentally associated with specific visual expectations (e.g., dark-skinned threats) and classifications (e.g., Latin American, Syrian, poor, economic drains). However, these findings provide only partial accounts of how migrant illegality is represented: visual representations could shift depending on the various societal positions or categories illegalized immigrants occupy. We therefore introduce a factorial cross-categorical reverse correlation design where online participants (N = 480) visualized immigrants simultaneously associated with certain documentation statuses (documented or undocumented), economic circumstances (job or welfare), and nationalities (Mexican, Irish, Chinese, or Nigerian). The resulting images and evaluations by naïve samples (N = 345) highlighted that: 1) illegality is not always visually encoded as darker skin, 2) affective face expressions hint at racialized expectations of European vs. non-European immigrants’ societal positions in the U.S., and 3) disaggregation of a target category is critical for understanding the relationship between categorical and visual mental representations.