Exploring the Connection between Immigration and Violent Crime Rates in US Cities, 1980-2000

A popular perception is that immigration causes higher crime rates. Yet, historical and contemporary research finds that at the individual level, immigrants are not more inclined to commit crime than the native born. Knowledge of the macro-level relationship between immigration and crime, however, is characterized by important gaps. Most notably, despite the fact that immigration is a macro-level social process that unfolds over time, longitudinal macro-level research on the immigration-crime nexus is virtually nonexistent. Moreover, while several theoretical perspectives posit sound reasons why over-time changes in immigration could result in higher or lower crime rates, we currently know little about the veracity of these arguments. To address these issues, this study investigates the longitudinal relationship between immigration and violent crime across U. S. cities and provides the first empirical assessment of theoretical perspectives that offer explanations of that relationship. Findings support the argument that immigration lowers violent crime rates by bolstering intact (two-parent) family structures

Does the Nature of the Victimization–Offending Association Fluctuate Over the Life Course? An Examination of Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Decades of criminological research has established that victimization is strongly connected with offending—this pattern is among the most durable in the criminological literature. However, there are plausible reasons to believe that under some theoretically defined conditions, the association can vary across the life course. Using 10 waves from the Pathways to Desistance data, which follow more than 1,300 youth from early adolescence into adulthood, we model within-individual change in the victimization–offending association as well as evaluate possible theoretical reasons for this change. Our results show that the influence of victimization on offending weakens as people age, although the association remains positive across the life course. The core substantive predictors, however, could not account for this temporal weakening of the association. We discuss the implications of these results for further theoretical development on offending

Immigration and the Changing Nature of Homicide in US Cities, 1980–2010

Objectives: Previous research has neglected to consider whether trends in immigration are related to changes in the nature of homicide. This is important because there is considerable variability in the temporal trends of homicide subtypes disaggregated by circumstance. In the current study, we address this issue by investigating whether within-city changes in immigration are related to temporal variations in rates of overall and circumstance-specific homicide for a sample of large US cities during the period between 1980 and 2010. Methods: Fixed-effects negative binomial and two-stage least squares (2SLS) instrumental variable regression models are used to analyze data from 156 large US cities observed during the 1980-2010 period. Results: Findings from the analyses suggest that temporal change in overall homicide and drug homicide rates are significantly related to changes in immigration. Specifically, increases in immigration are associated with declining rates for each of the preceding outcome measures. Moreover, for several of the homicide types, findings suggest that the effects of changes in immigration vary across places, with the largest negative associations appearing in cities that had relatively high initial (i.e., 1970) immigration levels. Conclusions: There is support for the thesis that changes in immigration in recent decades are related to changes in rates of lethal violence. However, it appears that the relationship is contingent and varied, not general. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York