NIJ-Day: Exploring the Relationship between Immigration Status and Crime: New Approaches with Large Datasets

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

In FY 2019 and FY 2020, the National Institute of Justice funded research studies to address nuanced questions about the relationship between immigration status and crime perpetration and victimization in the United States. The research literature at that time indicated immigrants were generally less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens; however, this weak or negative association was less accurate for more assimilated immigrants and for second and later generation immigrants who were born in the U.S. This research was limited in several key ways, including failing to account for significant variation across types of immigrants, limitations in the measurement of crime, and failing to examine how the broader context, such as geographic locations as well as immigration policies and practices may influence the immigration-crime relationship. The four papers on this panel each report on analyses of large datasets developed by the project staff using a variety of types of national, state, and local publicly available and restricted use datasets to address prior limitations in examining this relationship.

Sub Unit

• Area IV. Correlates of Crime / 29. Immigration/Migration

Individual Presentations

• Advances in Modeling Unauthorized Status in a National Sample Using a Bayesian Approach - Christopher Inkpen, RTI International; Jonathon Holt, RTI International; Kimberly Janda, RTI International; Kasey Jones, RTI International

• The Empirics of Immigration and Violence: Evidence from California and Texas - Michael Light, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Laura Boisten, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Jungmyung Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Immigration and Crime in Context: An Examination Across Neighborhoods in a Large Sample of U.S.Cities - Charis E. Kubrin, University of California, Irvine; John Hipp, University of California, Irvine; Emily Owens, University of California, Irvine

• Federal-Local Partnerships on Immigration Law Enforcement: Are the Policies Effective in Reducing Violent Victimization? - Eric P. Baumer, Pennsylvania State University; Min Xie, University of Maryland

Chair

• Jennifer K. Grotpeter, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice