Crimes committed by recent immigrants: Characteristics and community patterns

Abstract

The notion persists that recent immigrants commit substantively more serious crimes than citizens, but prior research has only used aggregate-level data or youth-focused samples. We address this gap using individual-level 2017 crime arrest data from the Houston Police Department (HPD) that include citizenship, supplemented by Houston Super Neighborhoods data and American Community Survey estimates. We conduct bivariate and multilevel multinomial analyses to compare crime characteristics and neighborhood-level influences on offending by citizenship, finding that non-U.S. citizen arrestees were less likely to have been arrested for felonies, drug crimes, and Part I property crimes than U.S. citizen arrestees. An exploration of neighborhood contextual influences and interaction effects reveals further nuances. Directions for future research and implications for evidence-based policy are discussed.

Keywords:

• Citizenship
• crime severity
• immigration
• multilevel multinomial model

Disclosure statement

The author(s) report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 We use the term “recent immigrant,” in alignment with public perceptions and theories of immigration-and-crime (e.g., social disorganization), interchangeably with our operationalization “non-U.S. citizen” since earning U.S. citizenship takes several years. We assume that most of the non-U.S. citizens in our sample are recent immigrants and most of the U.S. citizens in our sample are either native-born or assimilated, naturalized immigrants; however, we cannot test the accuracy of this supposition due to the lack of a national origin variable in our dataset. The concept of immigration should not be misunderstood as identical to citizenship, since 45% of foreign-born people living in the United States (i.e., immigrants) have earned U.S. citizenship through naturalization (Budiman, 2020).

2 We obtained three years (2015–2017) of crime arrest data from Houston Police Department that included arrestee citizenship. The examination of the 2015 and 2016 data showed that citizenship was missing in 46.1% and 26.9% of each year’s data respectively. Therefore, we decided to only use the 2017 data, which had enough cases and only 1.5% missing values in citizenship.

3 This discrepancy is caused by the fact that some arrests occurred for incidents that took place prior to 2017. For example, someone arrested in 2017 for an offense committed in 1999 would appear in our 2017 arrest data but not in our 2017 crime incident data.

4 The lowest level of citizen and non-citizen data available from the American Community Survey 2017 data is census tract level data. Each Super Neighborhood intersects with multiple census tracts. A weight is assigned to a census tract based on the percentage of geographic area located inside the Super Neighborhoods. The sum of weighted total of non-U.S. citizens ${\sum }_{i=1}^k{w}_i{I}_i$ (where w is the weight of census tract i, and I is the non-U.S. citizen population of census tract i), is used to approximate the total non-U.S. citizens in a Super Neighborhood.

5 Given our large sample size (n = 38,264), we do not interpret main effects as significant based on a p < 0.05 alpha threshold. Only p < 0.01 and p < 0.001 level are considered significant in the current study, except for interaction terms (Table 3) since statistical power is reduced when considering interaction effects.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Davis Shelfer

Davis Shelfer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University. His research interests include immigration-and-crime and innovations in policing. His recent publications include a systematic review of Project Safe Neighborhoods evaluations and a test of the immigration revitalization perspective.

Yan Zhang

Yan Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University. Her recent work has appeared in Journal of Criminal Justice, Crime & Delinquency, Police Quarterly, and Justice Quarterly. Her current research focuses on policing and crime, social contextual effects on policing, and law enforcement program evaluation.