More Immigrants = Less Crime?

Last weekend, I watched the 1983 Al Pacino film Scarface. It's about one man (Pacino) and his compadres who were part of a wave of Cuban immigrants dumped on the United States by Fidel Castro in the early 1980s.

The result? Higher crime rates in south Florida, and, after 1983, lots of people with affected accents trying to act like Al Pacino trying to act like what Cubans are supposed to act like.

The day after viewing the movie, the New York Times Magazine ran an interesting story addressing the question about whether immigration leads to higher crime rates. There's good data to indicate that it doesn't.

Lou Dobbs can't be happy about this.

Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “I’ve discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics was lower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas.” He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami. In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”

The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard. A year ago, Sampson was an author of an article in The American Journal of Public Health that reported the findings of a detailed study of crime in Chicago. Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.

One not-so-fun-fact in the story: First generation immigrants mired in poverty don't turn to crime, but it is the second-generation immigrants -- the ones who have been discriminated against, beaten down and been here long enough to start imitating their American counterparts -- who are more likely to turn to crime.

Second-generation immigrants in Chicago were significantly more likely to commit crimes than their parents, it turns out, and those of the third generation more likely still.

Opponents of immigration frequently charge that Mexican immigrants threaten America’s national identity because of their failure to assimilate. A more reasonable concern might be the opposite of this: not that foreigners in low-income neighborhoods refuse to adopt the norms of the native culture but that their children and grandchildren do.

Isn't that a little sad?

I wish we could all start acting like Canadians, or at least acting like Al Pacino acting like what he thinks a Canadian should act like.

Hooah!