Immigration and Crime

Ethnicity, Race, and Violence

Ramiro Martinez, Jr., Abel Valenzuela, Jr.

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814796054
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The original essays in this much-needed collection broadly assess the contemporary patterns of crime as related to immigration, race, and ethnicity. Immigration and Crime covers both a variety of immigrant groups--mainly from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America--and a variety of topics including: victimization, racial conflict, juvenile delinquency, exposure to violence, homicide, drugs, gangs, and border violence.

The volume provides important insights about past understandings of immigration and crime, many based on theories that have proven to be untrue or racially biased, as well as offering new scholarship on salient topics. Overall, the contributors argue that fears of immigrant crime are largely unfounded, as immigrants are themselves often more likely to be the victims of discrimination, stigmatization, and crime rather than the perpetrators.

Contributors: Avraham Astor, Carl L. Bankston III, Robert J. Bursik, Jr., Roberto G. Gonzales, Sang Hea Kil, Golnaz Komaie, Jennifer Lee, Matthew T. Lee, Ramiro Martínez, Jr., Cecilia Menjívar, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Charlie V. Morgan, Amie L. Nielsen, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Rosaura Tafoya-Estrada, Abel Valenzuela, Jr., Min Zhou.

Chapter 1

Coming to America

The Impact of the New Immigration on Crime

Ramiro Martinez Jr.

The latest wave of immigration¹ to the United States—mainly from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America—has permanently altered the racial and ethnic composition of the United States.² One consequence is that Latinos replaced African Americans as the largest ethnic minority group at the turn of the new century. Many communities, both inside and outside traditional destination points in the southwestern United States, also felt a larger immigrant presence as Latinos in particular expanded the boundaries of older urban communities, reached into suburban areas, and pushed into small towns and rural communities in regions of the country where few co-ethnics had previously resided.³ Moreover, Asians—one of the fastest growing immigrant groups—are now proportionally more numerous than African Americans in some West Coast cities, and several communities are now dominated by this new population. On the other side of the country, large Haitian and Jamaican communities are emerging, while immigrants from Africa are a burgeoning presence in many East Coast neighborhoods. The increasing numbers and diversity of the newcomers, overwhelmingly non-European in composition, have sparked a heated public debate about the consequences of immigration, shifting discourse from concerns about race to concerns about immigrants.

For example, discussion of social problems stereotypically associated with racial minorities (e.g., blacks and Native Americans), such as high rates of male unemployment, substance abuse, and violent crime involvement, have now become important themes in the public immigration debate. At the same time, discussion has shifted to the “Latino problem” or the “immigrant dilemma,” again raising time-honored fears and suspicions about the newcomers. Since at least 1980, studies of race in the traditional black-and-white framework have increasingly been supplanted by more nuanced scholarly explorations of ethnicity. Research has appeared with increasing frequency on “Latino,” “Asian,” and even “Afro-Caribbean” populations at the same time that foreign-born newcomers have been changing the racial and ethnic configuration of the United States. While studies of immigrants in many social science disciplines have proliferated, less attention has been paid to immigrant crime or the consequences of immigration on crime, despite an intensified public debate about this topic. The current volume is an attempt to help fill this void in the research literature.

The contributors to this volume were asked that to the degree possible they cover the extent of immigrant criminal activity or immigrant victimization. The latter topic—the criminal victimization of immigrants—in particular is an overlooked theme in the social science literature and certainly not an issue central to the public debate on crime.⁴ Yet victimization among this group is an important social problem to explore, since it both contributes to crime in the United States and helps form immigrants’ perception of the criminal justice system.⁵ Over time, it also shapes the nature and extent of the immigrant experience with other racial/ethnic group members and with co-ethnics in new communities as they are incorporated into society.

In the following sections, I highlight current stereotypes about immigrant criminality and provide a brief overview of early theoretical and empirical work on the immigration and crime relationship. I then focus on more contemporary work in this area. In the last section of the chapter, I address the many contributions the current volume makes to the nascent immigration and crime literature.

Criminal Immigrant Stereotypes

The connection between immigration and crime is an important issue to consider. Debates on the topic date back more than a hundred years; some early twentieth-century writers alleged that immigrant groups were biologically deficient compared with nonimmigrants. Thus crime and disorder were among several harmful outcomes that could be expected as long as “inferior” immigrants were allowed to enter the country.⁶ Reactions to the alleged link between immigration and crime were soon reflected in immigration policy. In fact, the growing fear of immigrants and crime helped facilitate the passage of the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, which substantially reduced the number of immigrants admitted to the United States.⁷

The public media and politicians are now again debating the costs and consequences of allowing immigrants into American society, and, in the new era of immigration, familiar fears about the potential criminal activities of the newcomers have risen. Without much empirical research to consider, this debate risks inaccuracies and exaggerations of the level of immigrant crime, while possibly inflaming unfounded public concerns that immigrants might become an underclass group of criminals. Such fears have also been fueled by some academicians and writers. To illustrate, I present three recent examples from pseudo–social scientists and self-styled public intellectuals, along with empirically based assessments of their claims. I focus on Latinos in particular and look at a range of “concerns” and “claims” about Latino “crime.” The first example comes from Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, a professor of political science at Harvard University and author of the widely read and often contested book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. More recently in his latest book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, he continues to perpetuate stereotypes of an immigrant group singled out by many as crime-prone decades ago:

The Cubanization of Miami coincided with high levels of crime. For each year between 1985 and 1993, Miami ranked among the top three large cities (over 250,000 people) in violent crime. Much of this was related to the growing drug trade but also to the intensity of Cuban immigrant politics.… Political groups, race riots, and drug-related crime had made Miami a volatile and often dangerous place.⁸

There are several inaccuracies and ambiguities in this statement. First, in referring to a “Cubanization” of Miami that took place in the 1980s, Huntington seems to ignore the sizable Cuban population that already lived in Miami before that time. Since an estimated 125,000 Mariel Cubans arrived in South Florida between April and October 1980, it is important to distinguish between Cubans living in Miami before 1980 and those who immigrated during and after the Mariel boatlift. This omission is curious because Huntington does distinguish between Mariel and other Cuban immigrants in his chapter “Mexican Immigration and Hispanization” and Mariels were often stereotyped as especially crime prone by the national and local media. Regardless, published research demonstrates that the Mariel Cuban homicide victim and offending rates rose in the early 1980s, approaching those of African Americans at one point, but then declined to levels of other Latinos and non-Latino whites by 1985, the starting date of Huntington’s concerns about Cubanization.⁹

Huntington also claims that Miami ranked high in violent crime during a period (1990–93) when the Mariel Cubans were rarely arrested for any killings. In fact, there were so few Mariels engaging in homicide in the late 1980s that the Miami Police Department homicide detectives stopped distinguishing them from other ethnic groups by 1990.¹⁰ Moreover, while Miami had its share of drug-related homicides, between 1980 and 1990 at least 83 percent of solved homicides were not related to drugs.¹¹ Last, violent crime rates rose nationally during this period, including in places with few immigrants.¹² The city of Miami, a place with high poverty rates, a factor known to be associated with higher crime and violence, was near the top of this list even before the 1980 Mariel boatlift or “Cubanization” more generally. For example, Marvin Wolfgang, in his classic Patterns in Criminal Homicide, lists ten cities with the highest rates of homicide using data from 1950, a point predating sizable immigration from Cuba. Miami is at the top of that list.¹³

A second example of an inaccurate statement on criminal immigrants is provided in a widely publicized memoir by Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. The author focuses on the Central Valley area, another region that traditionally has experienced significant immigration:

The Latino death rate—both citizens and aliens—from homicide is three times higher than for non-Hispanic whites. It is daily fare in our local papers to read of bodies dumped in peach orchards, the putrid remains of corpses fished out of irrigation canals, or the body parts and bones of the long-dead uncovered by the cultivators. These are the remains of hundreds of young men from central Mexico who simply disappeared—shot or stabbed and then dumped by thieves and murderers.¹⁴

Professor Hanson’s sources, or rather the lack of them throughout the book, are not clear, at least from my reading of his information. First, according to a National Center for Health Statistics report published in 1998, the Latino homicide rate is three times higher than that for non-Latino whites. However, it is also half the homicide rate of non-Latino blacks at the national level.¹⁵ The same CDC report also notes that the Latino homicide rate declined by 43 percent from 1990 to 1998.¹⁶ It is unfortunate that Hanson neglects to mention the dramatic drop in the Latino homicide rate over a period of intense Mexican immigration into the United States or the fact that Latino homicide rates are generally much lower than expected given social conditions.¹⁷

Second, it is hard to envision any place could contain the remains of “hundreds of young Mexicans” without arousing suspicion from co-workers, neighbors, spouses, lovers, family members, and others. For a point of comparison, consider that the City of San Diego Police Department reported almost 1,000 (N = 932) Hispanic or Mexican total homicide victims between the years of 1960 through 2002.¹⁸ Thus we are asked to believe that the total number of Latino killings in one of the largest cities in the United States, over a forty-two-year time period, is likely substantially lower than what allegedly occurred in the Central Valley orchards. Moreover, it is not clear how the author concluded these were all Mexican victims of violent crime. Perhaps a new type of DNA test, one that can distinguish Mexicans from non-Mexicans, was conducted on these remains. Finally, it is regrettable that Professor Hanson did not provide any citations in his book to substantiate any of his claims. This is a task that he claims “professional Latinos” or “race hustlers” neglect in chapter 5 of his book.

A final example of public hysteria over immigrant crime, in this case singling out young Latinos rather than the Latino population as a whole, is provided by Heather MacDonald. MacDonald is a nonpracticing attorney and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City. She is also a contributing editor to City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute. MacDonald’s claim follows:

Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture. (By “Hispanic” here, I mean the population originating in Latin America—above all, in Mexico—as distinct from America’s much smaller Puerto Rican and Dominican communities of Caribbean descent, which have themselves long shown elevated crime and welfare rates.) Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics—they worsen.¹⁹

It is not difficult to confirm that there was a rise in gang-related homicide, not necessarily crime, between 1999 and 2002. It is extremely difficult, however, to make the connection to the “Hispanic march across the country” that MacDonald blends into one concern. First, we can cautiously estimate the number of gang-related homicides. In the Bureau of Justice Statistics report entitled “Homicide Trends in the United States,”²⁰ the homicide circumstance section notes that “[f]or gang related homicides, the number of victims begins at 129 in 1976 and gradually increases to a high of 1,362 in 1993. It drops to 834 in 1998 followed by an increase reaching 1,119 in 2002.” According to my calculations this is a 34 percent increase from 1998 to 2002. Moreover, for some perspective, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2002 there were 4,752 killings that began as some type of argument or fight. That same year 2,656 felony homicides were committed during a rape, robbery, burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, or other crime. Most homicides are not gang related, and most homicides declined while immigration grew and immigrants spread across the nation.²¹ In addition, the connection to Latino/Hispanic disproportionate involvement, especially over time and across generations, was not established, since ethnicity was not detailed in this report—or in most crime ...