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Does Mexican immigration reduce crime?
Robert Sampson writes in today's NYT Op-Ed page:
...evidence points to increased immigration as a major factor associated with the lower crime rate of the 1990's (and its recent leveling off).
Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators -- including propensity to violence -- than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages. My colleagues and I have completed a study in which we examined 8,000 Chicago residents who were asked about the characteristics of their neighborhoods.
Surprisingly, we found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans than among blacks and whites...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. [TC: But don't absolute probabilities play the key role here? And should we compare Mexicans to "blacks and whites" or to each group in isolation?] Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation.
Our study further showed that living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigrants is directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of factors...)
Alas, there is no permalink these days. Here is the relevant project which generated the data. No one of Sampson's pieces on his web page seems to cover this result, though many are relevant more broadly. Also see this summary of his criticism of "broken window" and "tipping point" theories of crime.
Here is another piece which seems to support the basic result that Mexican immigration lowers crime. Here is a survey article on the topic. This piece (see p.113) suggests that crime is lower in border cities than comparable non-border cities, and that Mexican immigration cannot be identified as a cause of a higher U.S. crime rate.
Yes comments are open, but purely anecdotal accounts of how you were once mugged by a Mexican, or how your neighborhood just isn't "the same anymore" are discouraged. I'm posting a version of this over at Volokh Conspiracy as well, look for the differing comments.
Addendum: Read Alex on this topic.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 11, 2006 at 09:10 PM in Law | Permalink
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Comments
And should we compare Mexicans to "blacks and whites" or to each group in isolation?
The sentence in the NYT is a bit ambiguous, but I don't see why we ought to make the distinction you suggest. Isn't the issue whether Mexican immigrants have lower crime rates than the non-immigrant, or non-(Mexican immigrant), population?
Posted by: bernard Yomtov at Mar 11, 2006 9:40:14 PM
Not withstanding all the scare stories about MS-13 as a transnational gang that could trade with AQ, my understanding from someone who worked for the FBI's gang taskforce here in the Chicago area was that it was the kids of immigrants who were often apart of gangs. (though this study seems to be saying that it's the kids of kids of immigrants).
I wonder if the border city example holds true on both sides of the border (I bet it doesn't). Since most immigrants, I would presume, come here because their place of origin 'doesn't work' they would rationally be less likely to create new chaos. However, their children may grow up to have a more sacharine view of the old country. Likewise, concentrated immigrant communities could, in effect, be self-policing, as those living there will have connection by culture (and perhaps even origin). It is over time when those ties grow weaker through following generations (or at the edges of such communities, where society isn't watching), that a vacuum of power - in the form of societal pressure and 'everyone knows everyone' - that society breaks down and crime breaks out.
Thus, a neighborhood 'gentrified' by immigrants, say all from Jalisco, will be stable and safe, whereas one that is marked by incoming immigrants and black or white flight may be more crime-ridden because a sufficient civil society has not yet been formed.
Slightly OT: (I walked through a crowd of approximately 100k, mostly ethnically Mexican people yesterday protesting an anti-immigration law. 90 percent of the flags flown were the stars and stripes, and many people had draped themselves with it or something with those colors. The crowd was civil, not very boisterous, had lots of families, and the police reported no one arrested.)
Posted by: ElamBend at Mar 11, 2006 10:00:15 PM
My neighborhood in San Francisco was mostly black and chinese when I moved here 40 years ago, and is now is about half mexican immigrants. Over the same period of time, the crime rate has fallen dramatically, and the neighborhood has become noticably safer and more vibrant.
About twenty years ago, most of the storefronts were empty, boarded up or covered with graffiti. Now there is a graffiti crime watch (run by Mexican imigrants) and the storefronts are all full of businesses. Most of them are the sort I wouldn't ever patron (Western Union, TJ Max, etc.) but they seem to do great business.
The community has benefited tremendously from the immigration.
Posted by: Matt at Mar 11, 2006 10:58:41 PM
The jstor article TC links to points out that immigrants are
dispropotionately male. That should wipe out any other
demographic factors and mean that they increase the crime
rate.
Posted by: L at Mar 12, 2006 12:27:36 AM
Here's a thought (and I haven't read the relevant articles, so they may have been addressed): A number of immigrants come from countries where the police are not trustworthy. Reporting a crime may result in a bigger problem than just putting up with it. If immigrants live in communities with other immigrants, then immigrant-on-immigrant crime may be the most common. The victims may be leery of reporting the crime to the police due to their bad experiences back home. I don't know if this applies in the case of Mexican (or other Latin American) immigrants. Incidentally, when will be seeing Robert Sampson on the "O'Reilly Factor" debating Bill on the merits of immigration?
Posted by: Stan at Mar 12, 2006 1:02:36 AM
Sampson's op-ed includes massive logical errors which should be obvious to objective readers. I point them out in my www.VDARE.com response which will be up on Sunday night.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 12, 2006 2:45:53 AM
By the way, here are the state and federal imprisonment per capita rates by ethnicity as of 2002 relative to the non-Hispanic white imprisonment rate:
Black 7.2
Hispanic 2.9
Native American 2.1
Pacific Islander 1.8
White 1.0
Asian 0.22
[Source: The Color of Crime 2005]
The Mexican imprisonment rate is probably a little bit lower than the overall Hispanic rate (because Caribbean Hispanics have very high crime rates), but it's still high compared to the white and, especially, Asian rates.
To the extent that Hispanic newcomers are forcing American blacks out of a city, which is probably happening in NYC, Hispanic immigration can slightly lower a particular city's crime rate, but obviously, for America as a whole, it's not lowering the number of criminals by any means. The African-Americans just move somewhere else within America. It's obvious why New York Times editors would have self-interested reasons to sponsor the dispersal of African-Americans from NYC under economic pressure from Hispanics, but why that is good for America as a whole remains mysterious.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 12, 2006 3:01:38 AM
Are we referring to illegal or legal immigration from Mexico? If it's the former, the answer to the initial question certainly seems like a 'no' to me. In that case, illegal coming accross the border has committed a crime by definition. And their daily existence here probably adds several more
Posted by: Christopher at Mar 12, 2006 7:42:54 AM
Aren't illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes because they are illegal? This raises their cost of crime. The penalty they face may include deportation. There may be a positive externality that their children grow up in an environment where obeying the law (other than our immoral immigration laws) is highly valued.
Posted by: Tom Kelly at Mar 12, 2006 8:41:02 AM
Bernard Harcourt, at the U. of Chicago Law School, also has written
critically of the tipping point and broken window theories.
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Mar 12, 2006 9:04:48 AM
Wouldn't one of the prime reasons 1st generation immigrants commit fewer crimes be the fact that they typically arrive as adults who are past (or mostly past) the prime age for criminal behavior? Combine that with the fact that immigrants are a self-selected, non-random sample and you've probably got the answer (as well as the reason the effect fades and disappears in the following generations).
Posted by: Slocum at Mar 12, 2006 9:06:18 AM
Could it be that Mexican immigrants have a more religous background perhaps. It would be interesting to see if Mexican immigrants are more active in local churches (which is what I would hypothesize) and if that indeed has a negative effect on crime rates (which seems sensible to me also).
Posted by: Ben at Mar 12, 2006 10:23:44 AM
I agree with Tyler that the relevant comparison is the absolute propensity to commit crime, NOT correcting for background. Even if we assume that a poor, uneducated immigrant is less likely to commit a crime than a poor, uneducated citizen, so long as the immigrants on the whole are more likely to commit crimes than the national population, crime rates nationwide will increase even if they decrease in a specific area.
Also if the focus is on the criminality of immigrants, then shouldn't we bias the laws to favor the least problematic immgrants? e.g. opening the doors to Asians while tightening immigration from Latin America?
Posted by: nn at Mar 12, 2006 10:53:16 AM
This is a really, really bad op-ed.
Sampson implies that immigration is a major factor responsible for the large decline in crime rates over the past 15 or so years, but a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this is impossible. He ignores the fact that the presence of second and third generation immigrants, who have much higher crime rates than first generation, are themselves a direct result of immigration. His description of the research is sketchy at best, and it appears that he probably controlled for things he shouldn't have controlled for, as Tyler points out. The research doesn't seem to be available for review anywhere online, and in fact he doesn't even tell us who his co-authors are or how we might find the research. Thus it is impossible to say whether the research itself is any good, but the op-ed inspires no confidence.
(The fact that first generation immigrants as a group have lower crime rates than demographically comparitive natives is interesting, though, and not particularly surprising to me.)
Posted by: ed johnson at Mar 12, 2006 7:22:00 PM
My response to Sampson's NYT op-ed is now up at:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/060312_sampson.htm
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 13, 2006 12:12:36 AM
Robert Sampson writes:
[Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators -- including propensity to violence -- than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages.]
So the whole article is based on the idea that bad socio-economic indicators cause crime. Implicit is the assumption that if racist america would only give hispanics a socio-economic outcome the same as whites, they'd commit even less crimes then whites. I kind of thought that liberals dissavowed this stuff. I thought it was non-pc to say that poor people commit more crimes. I thought that PC liberals think there is a large number of undetected white-collar crimes that even up the crime numbers between the poor and affluent. So thus, maybe Sampson isn't so PC, but did elite, liberal NYT readers detect this non-PC heresay? Did it offend them? Or do they not mind because Sampson is serving the greater good of defending the mass immigration of the "downtrodden".
Posted by: PJGoober at Mar 13, 2006 4:39:06 PM
"heresay" above should read "heresey"
Posted by: PJGoober at Mar 13, 2006 4:40:31 PM
Perhaps the reason why immigrants cause less crime is because the major reason for their immigration is economic.
Certainly, my father immigrated from Mexico because of economic reasons. He heard that people were richer in the US so he emigrated and worked initially as a migrant laborer and eventually worked his way up to being a factory worker. I think his overriding goal was to make money and not to create crime.
I imagine this is also the main reason why other immigrants aren't committing crimes because they want to move ahead in life. Now once those immigrants have kids who have grown up here. Those children may or may not have the same economic drive (since they didn't uproot themselves to another country) and so that is where some may turn to crime.
Posted by: Hackerius at Mar 13, 2006 4:59:29 PM
I will note that the crime rates in Mexico are astonishingly high compared to the US. Nor do I see any measure of immigration that lowers crime rates (by flooding the nation with vast amounts of people who don't commit crimes in America, unlike Mexico).
I could grant that this might happen (immigrants to the US from Mexico behave radically different than randomly selected Mexicans inside Mexico. But not the amount of immigration needed to wash out presumably the violent Americans.
The biggest objection is that Sampson offers no critique of alternate explanations: expanding economies making crime a bad economic choice (why commit crimes when you have a job)? Or a few bad actors who were responsible for most crimes being locked up.
Alternatively, we can posit that illegal immigration drives down wages at the low end and causes more people on the margins to turn to crime (petty and otherwise) to survive. And as rates of illegal immigration increase all things being equal, this effect will increase as well.
Posted by: Jim Rockford at Mar 14, 2006 1:04:07 AM
Steve Sailer's demolition job on Sampson's editorial should, I think, pretty much conclude this discussion.
Posted by: Steve Burton at Mar 14, 2006 10:11:34 AM
Maybe we can get the Mexicans to hunt down the real source of crime, blacks and their white benefactors, the proponents of the welfare state, which leads to the increased breeding of criminals, mostly black. Liberia was created for these blacks.
Posted by: Mark at Mar 14, 2006 3:18:55 PM
[I thought it was non-pc to say that poor people commit more crimes. I thought that PC liberals think there is a large number of undetected white-collar crimes that even up the crime numbers between the poor and affluent.]
First I or my liberal friends have heard of this. The PC liberal line is that poor criminals tend to be that way due to socioeconomic circumstances, as opposed to being morally unfit, and would be less criminal if raised in middle-class backgrounds. There may also be a belief that white-collar crime is underreported in some areas, or more importantly *underpunished*, but that poor people commit more crimes seems obvious.
Posted by: Damien at Mar 14, 2006 7:29:30 PM
Sampson writes:
[Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators -- including propensity to violence -- than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages.]
Let me translate this study: We can pay hispanic immigrants crap and they won't commit as many crimes white or black natives would if we paid them that crappy, because they come from a third world country so it's still a lot for them. But, more relavently to the actual crime rate, they still commit more crimes than native born because damnnnnn we pay them crappy! Oh, and the effect dissappears with each succeeding generation, and in America's long term future, generations after 1st generation are what matter.
Also, Hispanics have been poor and will be poor for a long time. Using Sampson's own equations plugging in socio-economic factors and spitting out crime, would undoubtedly reveal that for at least several decades to come (the time frame in which hispanics could concievably come close to anglo socio-economic indicators), hispanics will disproportionately commit crimes on an absolute scale (hispanics who are almost all descended from 1st generation immigrants).
I don't understand how some people can dismiss immigration restricionists as racist, nativist, anti-foriegn biased, etc. I'd like them to explain why not wanting to have crimes commited upon you on an absolute scale (screw Sampson's adjustment, if you are mugged by someone making 12,000 a year, Sampson doesn't weigh it as that important, but you still got mugged), is racist.
Posted by: PJGoober at Mar 15, 2006 7:38:37 AM
We just can't continue turning a blind eye to the illegal immigration circumstance. The american citizenery are by and large fed up with with the problems created and the revenue spent. Three things can fix this problem... A new law, two penalties, and a reward.
Put into law that all undocumented aliens must be paid at a rate of twice the hourly or saleried wage as us citizens are. Any emmployer not adhereing to this law would be fined 5,000 and the alien fined 2,000 and deported. The 2,000 would pay for the costs of deportation, and the 5,000 would pay for the 3,000 reward for turning in the lawbreakers. This leaves 2,000 for some polititians pork barrell prodject. (and i meant to spell it that way)
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