REASSESSING THE BREADTH OF THE PROTECTIVE BENEFIT OF IMMIGRANT NEIGHBORHOODS: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE RISK BY RACE, ETHNICITY, AND LABOR MARKET STRATIFICATION*

• Author: MIN XIE,ERIC P. BAUMER
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12172

REASSESSING THE BREADTH OF THE PROTECTIVE

BENEFIT OF IMMIGRANT NEIGHBORHOODS:

A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE RISK

BY RACE, ETHNICITY, AND LABOR MARKET

STRATIFICATION∗

MIN XIE 1and ERIC P. BAUMER2

1Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Maryland—College Park

2Department of Sociology and Criminology, Pennsylvania State University

KEYWORDS: immigration, victimization, race, Hispanics or Latinos, National Crime

Victimization Survey (NCVS)

Researchers in the United States have increasingly recognized that immigration re-

duces crime, but it remains unresolved whether this applies to people of different

racial–ethnic and economic backgrounds. By using the 2008–2012 area-identified Na-

tional Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), we evaluate the effect of neighborhood

immigrant concentration on individual violence risk across race/ethnicity and labor

market stratification factors in areas with different histories of immigration. The re-

sults of our analysis reveal three key patterns. First, we find a consistent protective role

of immigrant concentration that is not weakened by low education, low income, unem-

ployment, or labor market competition. Therefore, even economically disadvantaged

people enjoy the crime-reduction benefit of immigration. Second, we find support for

threshold models that predict a nonlinear, stronger protective role of immigrant con-

centration on violence at higher levels of immigrant concentration. The protective func-

tion of immigration also is higher in areas of longer histories of immigration. Third,

compared with Blacks and Whites, Latinos receive a greater violence-reduction ben-

efit of immigrant concentration possibly because they live in closer proximity with

immigrants and share common sociocultural features. Nevertheless, immigrant con-

centration yields a diminishing return in reducing Latino victimization as immigrants

approach a near-majority of neighborhood residents. The implications of these results

are discussed.

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2018.56.issue-2/issuetoc.

This research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (Awards No.

1625730 and 1625698), the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Department

of Justice (Award No. 2012-R2-CX-0017), and (in part) the Russell Sage Foundation (Award No.

93-16-07). The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily

reflect those of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Justice, or the Russell Sage

Foundation.

Direct correspondence to Min Xie, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University

of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: mxie@umd.edu).

C2018 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12172

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 56 Number 2 302–332 2018 302

A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE RISK 303

The findings reported in contemporary research provide compelling evidence that com-

munities with larger immigrant populations exhibit less overall crime, especially in polit-

ical, social, and economic “contexts of reception” that are favorable to immigrant incor-

poration (Desmond and Kubrin, 2009; Lee, Martinez, and Rosenfeld, 2001; MacDonald,

Hipp, and Gill, 2013; Ousey and Kubrin, 2009; Stowell and Martinez, 2009; V´

elez, 2009).

Indeed, as MacDonald and Sampson (2012: 9) noted, areas of immigrant concentration

are “some of safest places around” (see also Sampson, 2008).

Despite mounting empirical evidence, some politicians and a large portion of the public

remain skeptical of the crime-reducing benefits of immigrant concentration (see Beinart,

2017; Pew Research Center, 2015). This skepticism may reflect deep-seated stereotypes

about immigrants that are reinforced through selective and sensational media coverage

(Rumbaut, 2008). Moreover, skepticism may stem in part from doubts about the empirical

evidence supporting the noted inverse association between immigration and crime. The

existing research has been focused either on homicide, which represents a tiny proportion

of the crimes committed in the United States, or on police-based measures of nonlethal

crime and arrest rates, which may yield inaccurate results because of the differences in

police notification and arrest patterns in areas with large immigrant populations.1These

data limitations weaken the impact of research findings that refute the general notion that

immigration is associated with elevated crime rates. An analysis addressing these issues

is timely given the current national and local dialogue concerning proposed changes to

American immigration policy.

In this article, we enrich the empirical basis of claims about the potentially protective

benefit of immigration by circumventing the police-based data source with multilevel data

from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to assess the relationship between

neighborhood immigrant concentration and nonlethal violence. The NCVS data improve

our ability to measure crimes that are unknown to the police, and thus, we provide this

study to complement research comprising police-based crime rates. Substantively, we fo-

cus on whether neighborhood immigrant concentration is associated with reductions in

violent victimization risk for all individuals who reside in such communities or, rather,

whether that protective benefit depends on one’s racial and ethnic status or exposure to

different labor market realities.

Our theoretical orientation is grounded in immigrant revitalization theory (Lee and

Martinez, 2002; Martinez and Lee, 2000a), which implies that the crime-reduction benefit

of communities with a larger proportion of immigrants should be enjoyed by all residents.

Nevertheless, through an emerging “threshold” model of immigrant social revitalization

(Browning, Dirlam, and Boettner, 2016) and the literature on economic revitalization re-

lated to immigration (Reed and Danziger, 2007; Shihadeh and Barranco, 2010a), evidence

has been introduced that race, ethnicity, and labor market conditions may modify the pro-

tective effects of immigrant concentration (see also Painter-Davis, 2013). Furthermore,

1. As Zatz and Smith (2012) noted, areas with high levels of immigrant concentration may be charac-

terized by low rates of police notification, which may yield police-based crime estimates in immi-

grant communities that are biased downward. Additionally, areas with many immigrants may be

under- or overpoliced compared with other places (see also Davies and Fagan, 2012; Kirk et al.,

2012). Thus, studies of immigration and crime with arrest rates used as an indicator of crime rates

may yield results that do not accurately reflect the true relationship between immigration and

crime.