Displaced, dispossessed, or lawless? Examining the link between ethnicity, immigration, and violence

The goal of this paper is to build on the growing body of research on immigration and crime in two important ways. The first is to employ more specific measures of immigration than have been used in previous analyses. Specifically, this analysis includes measures of ethnicity, indicators that contain information about both nativity and country of origin, which have rarely been used in prior research. Using ethnic-origin as a means of classifying a neighborhood's foreign-born population will promote a more nuanced understanding of the differential impacts of immigration on levels of violent criminal offending. Additionally, this research advances current knowledge on the link between immigration and crime by using more comprehensive crime indicators, including measures of non-lethal violence, which allows for a test of the degree to which the impact of immigration on violence varies across crime types. Using data for Miami and Houston, two immigrant destination cities, the results illustrate the need for researchers to be sensitive to ethnic differences among foreign-born populations. The findings support the calls for a refinement of the disorganization theory, one that is sensitive to the differences among the foreign-born population and one that does not assume that immigration is a causally associated with levels of criminal violence.