IMMIGRATION AND HOMICIDE: From Eastern Europe to the U.S.-Mexico Border

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

This chapter explores immigration from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century and the theoretical debates that emerged to explain potential linkages between immigration and crime, from social Darwinist explanations to Social Disorganization Theory and the Chicago School of ecological thought. In recent decades, heated public rhetoric overstated the claim that Latino immigration raises crime in the United States. On the whole, Latino immigrants neither import crime into the United States nor drive up crime rates in local communities. But for its part, early 21st-century criminological research was also incorrect. In countering the anti-immigration rhetoric, researchers overstated the negative association between immigration and homicide. Indeed, the rosy hypothesis that Latino immigration caused the great American crime decline is incorrect. The “all-is-well” narrative, that in retrospect applies only to apply to old, established destinations, rings decidedly hollow in new Latino destinations. There, Latino immigrants experience comparatively high levels of violent victimization. This duality in the Latino migrant and settlement experience requires a more encompassing explanation without an appeal to paradoxes or exceptions (i.e., the Latino Paradox). Instead, the Chicago School’s ecological framework, which explained immigration a century before, still offers a durable framework to understand why the same people, separated into old and new destinations, experience different social lives.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Routledge Handbook of Homicide Studies

First Page

410

Last Page

434

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