Rise in immigration may help explain drop in violent crimes

at a single point in time cannot explain the cause of crime rates.

Using such snapshots in time, Wadsworth finds that cities with larger foreign-born and new-immigrant populations do have higher rates of violent crime. Many factors, however — including economic conditions — influence crime rates. If higher rates of immigration were boosting crime rates, one would expect long-term studies to show crime rising and falling over time with the influx and exodus of immigrants. Instead, Wadsworth found the opposite.

Using long-term analyses, Wadsworth noted, cities that experienced the largest growth in the proportion of foreign-born and newly arrived immigrant populations experienced larger decreases in violent crime between 1990 and 2000. That finding, Wadsworth wrote, “suggests that Sampson may be right — that immigration may be partly responsible for the decrease in violent crime.”

Wadsworth’s research suggests that, controlling for a variety of other factors, growth in the new immigrant population was responsible, on average, for 9.3 percent of the decline in homicide rates, and that growth in total immigration was, on average, responsible for 22.2 percent of the decrease in robbery rates.

Exactly why growth in immigration is accompanying decreases in violent crime is hard to determine with city-level data. Some have suggested that immigrant communities are often characterized by extended family networks, lower levels of divorce, and cultural and religious beliefs that facilitate community integration. Wadsworth notes that “criminologists have long known that these factors provide buffers against crime.”

Sampson’s study

Sampson, whose 2006 article inspired Wadsworth’s research, suggests we consider what sociologists call the “Latino paradox”: Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators — including propensity to violence — than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages. Sampson and his colleagues have completed a study in which they examined violent acts by almost 3,000 males and females, ranging in age from 8 to 25, from 1995 to 2003. The study selected whites, blacks, and Hispanics (primarily Mexican-Americans) from 180 Chicago neighborhoods ranging from highly segregated to very integrated. The researchers also analyzed data from police records, the Census, and a separate survey of more than 8,000 Chicago residents who were asked about the characteristics of their neighborhoods.

Surprisingly, the researchers found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans than among blacks and whites. A major reason is that more than a quarter of all those of Mexican descent were born abroad and more than half lived in neighborhoods where the majority of residents were also Mexican. Indeed, the first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background. Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation.

Sampson writes that this “protective” pattern among immigrants holds true for non-Hispanic whites and blacks as well. The researchers’ study further showed that living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration is directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of factors, including poverty and an individual’s immigrant status).

Sampson concludes:

The emerging story goes against the grain of popular stereotypes. Among the public, policymakers and even academics, a common expectation is that a concentration of immigrants and an influx of foreigners drive up crime rates, because of the assumed propensities of these groups to commit crimes and settle in poor, presumably disorganized communities. This belief is so pervasive, studies show, that the concentration of Latinos in a neighborhood strongly predicts perceptions of disorder no matter what the actual amount of crime and disorder.

Yet our study found that immigrants appear in general to be less violent than people born in America, particularly when they live in neighborhoods with high numbers of other immigrants. We are thus witnessing a different pattern from early 20th-century America, when growth in immigration from Europe was linked with increasing crime and formed a building block for what became known as “social disorganization” theory.

In today’s world, then, it is no longer tenable to assume that immigration automatically leads to chaos and crime. New York is a magnet for immigration, yet it has for a decade ranked as one of America’s safest cities. Border cities like El Paso and San Diego have made similar gains against crime. Perhaps the lesson is that if we want to continue to crack down on crime, closing the nation’s doors is not the answer.

This is also Wadsworth’s conclusion: “From the late 1800s to the present, the association between immigration and crime has been a center point of anti-immigrant discourse and public policy,” Wadsworth writes. “Although there has been scant empirical research to support such claims, they have persisted with little debate.”