The Generality of the Neighborhood Immigration – Crime Relationship

• In Event: Immigration, Communities, and Crime

Abstract

Research on crime and immigration at the neighborhood level often employs secondary data which focuses heavily on percentage foreign born as a measure of immigration and on homicide to represent crime. While these studies tend to show an inverse relationship between neighborhood immigration and homicide, alternative measures of crime and different conceptualizations of immigration are clearly need to better understand and evaluate this relationhisp. To this end, the present research employs primary data collected in 2014 from a random sample of neighborhood clusters in El Paso, TX, to assess the association between neighborhood cirme and immigration. These data contain a variety of theoretically derived measures of immigration and crime which allow for a broader as well as more precise evaluation of this association. Measures of crime include household victimization, intimate partner violence, fear of crime, and perceptions of neighborhood crime, physical disorder and social disorder; whereas measures of immigration include percentages foreign born, immigrant generation, time spent in the US, immigrant status (e.g., undocumented) and transnationalism.

Authors

• Theodore Curry, University of Texas at El Paso

• Maria Cristina Morales, University of Texas at El Paso

• Harmon Hosch, University of Texas at El Paso

• Jorge Hernandez, University of Texas at El Paso