- 15 Feb 2009 00:54
#1799518
Economic Left/Right: -9.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.28
A really old article, but very interesting nonetheless.
--------------------
Good waves: If there's a link between urban crime and immigration, sociologists say, it's probably not what you think
AMONG OTHER THINGS, 2005 was the year that the Boston Miracle seemed to become a distant memory. The storied drop in the city's murder rate in the 1990s had drawn scholars, politicians, and police chiefs from around the country to observe and learn from Boston's crime-fighting prowess. But the murder rate has been climbing since it bottomed out in 1999, and this year it jumped to a 10-year high. Coming at a time when murder rates continued to fall in other big cities like Chicago and New York, the upsurge has sent local politicians scrambling for solutions, and examining what it was that worked so well last time.
To be sure, people have been dissecting and disputing the causes of the dramatic nationwide '90s decline in crime since it first showed up as a trend. Some credit innovative policing policies or tougher sentencing, others point to improving economic conditions or an aging population, still others the end of the crack epidemic.
The fact that the 1990s also saw one of the greatest influxes of immigrants in the country's history isn't often mentioned in these discussions. Crime, it has long been assumed, is one of the inevitable costs of immigration. As George W. Grayson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, wrote in the Washington Post opinion pages this summer, ''the evidence is overwhelming that an influx of poor immigrants-whether Italians, Irish, or Poles in the 19th and early 20th centuries or Hispanics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries-does bring crime, unruly drinking, public urination, unemployment, overcrowded dwellings, and property damage."
It may be surprising, then, to find agreement among several leading criminologists that immigration does not cause crime-and may even reduce it. None of them would argue that immigration is the most important factor everywhere, especially since the recent rise in Boston's murder rate comes as its foreign-born population continues to grow. But the increased flow of immigrants to major American cities nationwide, argues Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard sociologist and lead author of a major recent study on the topic, ''has been one of the more plausible explanations that we've seen for the decrease in the violence rate."
. . .
Skepticism about a link between increased crime and immigration isn't entirely new. Working in the 1920s and '30s, at the end of the country's last great wave of immigration, criminology pioneers Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin found that immigrants had lower crime rates than both native-born Americans and second-generation immigrants. It was American culture, Sutherland and Sellin concluded, that caused crime, and the less exposure to it one had the less likely one was to be a criminal.
Published earlier this year, the study led by Harvard's Sampson echoed these earlier surveys. Sampson and his colleagues followed a diverse group of nearly 3,000 Chicago youths from 1995 to 2002, and found that immigrant kids were less likely than peers of similar socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in everything from gang fights to arson to purse snatchings. Not only that, but even nonimmigrant kids who happened to live in immigrant neighborhoods were less likely than otherwise to be involved in violence.
Part of the explanation for this, Sampson says, is that immigrant families, while often poor, are more likely than other poor families to have stable, two-parent households, one factor widely understood to decrease the odds of violent activity.
But that didn't explain everything. In Sampson's study, simply being a first-generation immigrant, no matter what one's parents' marital status or one's education level, made one less likely to end up committing a violent crime. And while the immigrants in Sampson's sample were predominantly Latino, the trend also held for the African and Caribbean immigrants he followed.
Sampson and others can only hypothesize as to why. ''New immigrants," suggests John Hagan, a sociologist at Northwestern University, ''tend to be a self-selected group who are highly ambitious, energetic, innovative." Immigrants, it's been repeatedly found, are significantly more likely than their nonimmigrant neighbors to have jobs. Hagan suggests that they're also less likely to be interested in something as possibly ruinous as crime.
Ramiro Martinez, a sociologist at Florida International University, has come to similar conclusions by studying homicide rates among Latino and immigrant communities in Miami, El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, Chicago, and other cities. In each, he has found immigrants heavily underrepresented-especially considering their socioeconomic status-among convicted murderers. Andrew Karmen of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has found analogous results for New York state.
In fact, Martinez points out, some of America's best-known border towns have the country's lowest murder rates. ''San Diego, for example-a place that captures the public imagination with all this concern about losing the borders to Mexico-has one of the lowest homicide rates for any major American urban area in the United States." El Paso, another city seen as bearing the brunt of the swelling ranks of illegal immigrants, regularly ranks among the country's safest cities.
. . .
There are limits to the data in these studies. For one thing, they focus on violent crime rather than property crime, which is more prevalent. And little work has been done on immigration's effect on nonurban crime-perhaps understandably, since big cities both absorb most of the country's immigrants and experience most of its crime.
No studies, furthermore, have been able to determine whether illegal immigrants-who tend to loom particularly large in public fears-are as crime-averse as legal immigrants. On this front, though, criminologists have at least been able to make informed guesses. Sampson, for example, points out that 75 percent of the immigrants in his study listed themselves as noncitizens. While many of those may have been in the process of applying for citizenship, a good number, he suspects, were simply illegal. And Martinez claims that he's seen very few illegal immigrants in the prison populations, homicide reports, and detectives' assessments he's studied. ''They're laying low," he says, and committing a crime would only get them noticed.
Some, however, take issue with these findings-and not just anti-immigration activists. Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University political scientist, has done detailed surveys of crime and quality of life throughout Chicago. Even when he controlled for poverty, he found an increase in the concentration of Spanish-speaking immigrants in a neighborhood increased ''crime, social disorder problems, and physical decay."
In part, Skogan argues, this is because Chicago's immigrants are largely young and male, and young males are invariably the most crime-prone segment of any population. In addition, he says, immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, drive up crime by serving as easy targets for what Skogan calls ''specialty gangs" who target illegals because ''they can't report crimes, and they're walking around with a lot of cash-they're called 'walking ATM machines."'
Skogan also points out that immigrant experiences vary widely, especially in the second and third generation. While Chicago's immigration is largely Mexican, ''if you're talking about New York, for example, it's a more complicated mix of people coming in."
Sampson readily admits that the immigrant effect weakens with each successive generation. Like Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin, Sampson finds that the children of immigrants are more crime-prone than their parents, the third generation more crime-prone still. Why that is, he admits, is ''really the $64,000 question, that's really at the forefront of the research."
What it suggests, though, is that the causes of crime lie less with immigrants than with the country that they, like generations of new arrivals before them, are busily assimilating themselves into.
Boston.com
Seems logical. Immigrants move to a country to seek a better future. They're obviously very likely to be hard-working. And if American culture does cause crime, then it's not surprising that immigrants would less likely become criminals, considering they would've recently moved and not have integrated.
--------------------
Good waves: If there's a link between urban crime and immigration, sociologists say, it's probably not what you think
AMONG OTHER THINGS, 2005 was the year that the Boston Miracle seemed to become a distant memory. The storied drop in the city's murder rate in the 1990s had drawn scholars, politicians, and police chiefs from around the country to observe and learn from Boston's crime-fighting prowess. But the murder rate has been climbing since it bottomed out in 1999, and this year it jumped to a 10-year high. Coming at a time when murder rates continued to fall in other big cities like Chicago and New York, the upsurge has sent local politicians scrambling for solutions, and examining what it was that worked so well last time.
To be sure, people have been dissecting and disputing the causes of the dramatic nationwide '90s decline in crime since it first showed up as a trend. Some credit innovative policing policies or tougher sentencing, others point to improving economic conditions or an aging population, still others the end of the crack epidemic.
The fact that the 1990s also saw one of the greatest influxes of immigrants in the country's history isn't often mentioned in these discussions. Crime, it has long been assumed, is one of the inevitable costs of immigration. As George W. Grayson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, wrote in the Washington Post opinion pages this summer, ''the evidence is overwhelming that an influx of poor immigrants-whether Italians, Irish, or Poles in the 19th and early 20th centuries or Hispanics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries-does bring crime, unruly drinking, public urination, unemployment, overcrowded dwellings, and property damage."
It may be surprising, then, to find agreement among several leading criminologists that immigration does not cause crime-and may even reduce it. None of them would argue that immigration is the most important factor everywhere, especially since the recent rise in Boston's murder rate comes as its foreign-born population continues to grow. But the increased flow of immigrants to major American cities nationwide, argues Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard sociologist and lead author of a major recent study on the topic, ''has been one of the more plausible explanations that we've seen for the decrease in the violence rate."
. . .
Skepticism about a link between increased crime and immigration isn't entirely new. Working in the 1920s and '30s, at the end of the country's last great wave of immigration, criminology pioneers Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin found that immigrants had lower crime rates than both native-born Americans and second-generation immigrants. It was American culture, Sutherland and Sellin concluded, that caused crime, and the less exposure to it one had the less likely one was to be a criminal.
Published earlier this year, the study led by Harvard's Sampson echoed these earlier surveys. Sampson and his colleagues followed a diverse group of nearly 3,000 Chicago youths from 1995 to 2002, and found that immigrant kids were less likely than peers of similar socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in everything from gang fights to arson to purse snatchings. Not only that, but even nonimmigrant kids who happened to live in immigrant neighborhoods were less likely than otherwise to be involved in violence.
Part of the explanation for this, Sampson says, is that immigrant families, while often poor, are more likely than other poor families to have stable, two-parent households, one factor widely understood to decrease the odds of violent activity.
But that didn't explain everything. In Sampson's study, simply being a first-generation immigrant, no matter what one's parents' marital status or one's education level, made one less likely to end up committing a violent crime. And while the immigrants in Sampson's sample were predominantly Latino, the trend also held for the African and Caribbean immigrants he followed.
Sampson and others can only hypothesize as to why. ''New immigrants," suggests John Hagan, a sociologist at Northwestern University, ''tend to be a self-selected group who are highly ambitious, energetic, innovative." Immigrants, it's been repeatedly found, are significantly more likely than their nonimmigrant neighbors to have jobs. Hagan suggests that they're also less likely to be interested in something as possibly ruinous as crime.
Ramiro Martinez, a sociologist at Florida International University, has come to similar conclusions by studying homicide rates among Latino and immigrant communities in Miami, El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, Chicago, and other cities. In each, he has found immigrants heavily underrepresented-especially considering their socioeconomic status-among convicted murderers. Andrew Karmen of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has found analogous results for New York state.
In fact, Martinez points out, some of America's best-known border towns have the country's lowest murder rates. ''San Diego, for example-a place that captures the public imagination with all this concern about losing the borders to Mexico-has one of the lowest homicide rates for any major American urban area in the United States." El Paso, another city seen as bearing the brunt of the swelling ranks of illegal immigrants, regularly ranks among the country's safest cities.
. . .
There are limits to the data in these studies. For one thing, they focus on violent crime rather than property crime, which is more prevalent. And little work has been done on immigration's effect on nonurban crime-perhaps understandably, since big cities both absorb most of the country's immigrants and experience most of its crime.
No studies, furthermore, have been able to determine whether illegal immigrants-who tend to loom particularly large in public fears-are as crime-averse as legal immigrants. On this front, though, criminologists have at least been able to make informed guesses. Sampson, for example, points out that 75 percent of the immigrants in his study listed themselves as noncitizens. While many of those may have been in the process of applying for citizenship, a good number, he suspects, were simply illegal. And Martinez claims that he's seen very few illegal immigrants in the prison populations, homicide reports, and detectives' assessments he's studied. ''They're laying low," he says, and committing a crime would only get them noticed.
Some, however, take issue with these findings-and not just anti-immigration activists. Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University political scientist, has done detailed surveys of crime and quality of life throughout Chicago. Even when he controlled for poverty, he found an increase in the concentration of Spanish-speaking immigrants in a neighborhood increased ''crime, social disorder problems, and physical decay."
In part, Skogan argues, this is because Chicago's immigrants are largely young and male, and young males are invariably the most crime-prone segment of any population. In addition, he says, immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, drive up crime by serving as easy targets for what Skogan calls ''specialty gangs" who target illegals because ''they can't report crimes, and they're walking around with a lot of cash-they're called 'walking ATM machines."'
Skogan also points out that immigrant experiences vary widely, especially in the second and third generation. While Chicago's immigration is largely Mexican, ''if you're talking about New York, for example, it's a more complicated mix of people coming in."
Sampson readily admits that the immigrant effect weakens with each successive generation. Like Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin, Sampson finds that the children of immigrants are more crime-prone than their parents, the third generation more crime-prone still. Why that is, he admits, is ''really the $64,000 question, that's really at the forefront of the research."
What it suggests, though, is that the causes of crime lie less with immigrants than with the country that they, like generations of new arrivals before them, are busily assimilating themselves into.
Boston.com
Seems logical. Immigrants move to a country to seek a better future. They're obviously very likely to be hard-working. And if American culture does cause crime, then it's not surprising that immigrants would less likely become criminals, considering they would've recently moved and not have integrated.
Economic Left/Right: -9.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.28
- By Pants-of-dog
- By litwin