Immigration and Crime in Early 20th Century America

Abstract

Research on crime in the late 20th century has consistently shown that immigrants have lower rates of involvement in criminal activity than natives. We find that a century ago immigrants may have been slightly more likely than natives to be involved in crime. In 1904 prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity for all ages except ages 18 and 19 when the commitment rate for immigrants was higher than for the native born. By 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older. But this advantage disappears when one looks at commitments for violent offenses. Aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data meant that analysts at the time missed these important features of the immigrant-native incarceration comparison. The relative decline of the criminality of the foreign born reflected a growing gap between natives and immigrants at older ages, one that was driven by sharp increases in the commitment rates of the native born, while commitment rates for the foreign born were remarkably stable.

Migration Restrictions and Criminal Behavior: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

“…At the aggregate level, Butcher and Piehl (1998a), Bianchi et al (2008) and Bell et al (2010) document some correlation between-and within-local areas in the US, Italy and the UK, respectively, but conclude that the causal effect is not different from zero (maybe with the exception of asylum-seekers in the UK). 2 At the micro level, Piehl (1998b, 2007) use Census data to show that, keeping other individual characteristics constant, current immigrants have lower incarceration rates than natives, while the opposite was true for former immigrants at the beginning of the XX century (Moehling and Piehl, 2007). Yet, no previous study has investigated the role of legal status; this is precisely the contribution of the present paper.…”

Church, Place, and Crime: Latinos and Homicide in New Destinations*

“…Although immigration has long been linked to crime (Moehling and Morrison Piehl 2007; Thomas and Znaniecki 1958), recent research finds that this long‐held notion does not apply to Latinos (e.g., Dugan and Apel 2003; Lee, Martinez, and Rosenfeld 2001; Martinez 1996; Nielsen, Lee, and Martinez 2005; Nielsen, Martinez, and Lee 2005; Shihadeh and Barranco 2010a). In contrast to the experience of Eastern European migrants a century ago, Latinos settled in well‐established communities that, it turns out, are comparatively safe.…”

Legal Status and the Criminal Activity of Immigrants

“…In response to these concerns, a burgeoning literature documents the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across local areas within the United States (Butcher and Piehl 1998;Reid et al 2005;Moehling and Piehl 2007;Borjas, Grogger, and Hanson 2010;Wadsworth 2010;Spenkuch 2011), the United Kingdom (Bell, Machin, and Fasani 2010), Italy (Bianchi, Buonanno, and Pinotti 2012), and Spain (Alonso-Borrego, Garoupa, and Vàzquez 2012). However, the effect of legal status on immigrants' crime has remained largely unexplored, despite there being ample evidence that legal status improves greatly the labor market opportunities of immigrants (Bratsberg, Ragan, and Nasir 2002;Kossoudji and CobbClark 2002;Kaushal 2006;Amuedo-Dorantes, Bansak, and Raphael 2007;Lozano and Sorensen 2011).…”