Immigration And Crime Analysis

Words: 1125
Pages: 5

In the article, “Is Immigration Responsible for the Crime Drop? An Assessment of the Influence of Immigration on Changes in Violent Crime Between 1990 and 2000,” Tim Wadsworth claims that the relationship between crime and immigration has been a broad interest in many different fields, like academics, the general public, and legislation, since the late 1800s. Wadsworth, and other social scientists, believe that the rise in immigration, from 1990 to 2000, in the United States has decreased crime in cities with large population of immigrants. He performs a study in order to find out if the theory of immigration decreasing crime rate holds true. Wadsworth executes his study in order to find the influence immigration has on crime rates in the United …show more content…
Those characteristics were not included in the regression models, therefore, Wadsworth executed pooled cost-sectional time series analyses to assess the links between immigration, structural characteristics and crime between 1990 and 2000. Structural characteristics include skill level, documentation status, and degree to which the immigrant population has assimilated. The mentioned structural characteristics are not able to be measured since there is not immigrant specific aggregate Census data for such. However, data is available in the Census data that measures linguistic isolation across the country. Linguistic isolation is the percentage of households in which no one age 15+ speaks English well (Wadsworth, 547). This type of data can be used to observe the unobservable characteristics of the immigrant population. Households that are linguistically isolated are less likely to be of high socioeconomic status. Wadsworth reran his model using pooled data and used an indicator for linguistic isolation for both robbery and homicide. None of the results of this model represented the effects of language in households and violent crimes significantly. In conclusion, Wadsworth found that linguistic isolation is not a good representative for socioeconomic status or the way immigrant …show more content…
Given the nature of the data used for studies pertaining to immigration and crime makes it impossible to evaluate the issue correctly. Wadsworth mentions theoretical perspectives in his research to justify his claim. The two perspectives used in this research are the “healthy immigrant thesis” and the role of protective cultural and neighborhood factors. The “healthy immigrant thesis” main idea is if healthy and well-adjusted individuals migrate into a community with low criminal pattern, there would be an expected decline in crime. In other words, if immigrants are already level headed and do not have criminogenic characteristics, they will thrive in communities with low crime patterns and assimilate before developing criminogenic habits. The role of protective cultural and neighborhood factors are developed over time. If immigrant communities bring with them certain values and expectations into their new communities, those ideas will be shared within the community, over time, and are most likely to be followed. Therefore, allowing violent crime rates to shrink as communities grow. Making use of such sensitive and difficult to record data makes any research of this kind weak, so outside theories and/or data is