Homicide Studies

http://hsx.sagepub.com Immigration Effects on Homicide Offending For Total and Race/Ethnicity-Disaggregated Populations (White, Black, and Latino)
Ben Feldmeyer and Darrell Steffensmeier Homicide Studies 2009; 13; 211 originally published online May 1, 2009; DOI: 10.1177/1088767909336089 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hsx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/211

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Articles

Immigration Effects on Homicide Offending For Total and Race/Ethnicity-Disaggregated Populations (White, Black, and Latino)
Ben Feldmeyer
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Homicide Studies Volume 13 Number 3 August 2009 211-226 2009 SAge Publications 10.1177/1088767909336089 http://hs.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Darrell Steffensmeier
Penn State University, University Park

Sociological studies of crime have rarely examined the effects of immigration on aggregate patterns of violent offending, and particularly few studies have examined this relationship across multiple racial/ethnic populations. The current study extends research on immigration and crime by examining this relationship across total and race/ ethnicity-disaggregated populations (i.e., White, Black, and Latino) and for homicide offending (rather than homicide victimization) using 1999-2001 arrest data drawn from 328 census places in California. Findings reveal that immigrant concentration has trivial (nonsignificant) effects on overall homicides and Latino homicides, but slightly reduces White and Black homicide offending, net of controls. Implications of these findings are as follows: (a) Immigration does not have violence-generating effects but instead appears to have violence-neutral or perhaps some violence-reducing effects on homicide offending, and (b) This small or null effect is fairly consistent across racial/ ethnic populations. Keywords: immigration; homicide; race/ethnicity; Latinos; communities; social ecology of crime

n the present study, we build on and extend previous research on the immigration homicide link by using recent arrest data from California to examine the impact of immigrant concentration at the census place level on overall levels of homicide offending and on race/ethnic-disaggregated homicides (White, Black, Latino). Not only is the relationship between the recent wave of immigration and social problems, like crime, a pressing policy and political issue, but it is also an important theoretical issue that adjoins broad-based substantive interests within sociology, law, criminology, and public health. Politically, because immigration has been both a crucial component of Americas growth and a periodic source of conflict since at least the early 1800s, in recent years it has become one of the most contentious issues on the
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nations political agenda (Horowitz, 2001; Tonry, 1997). Notably, a large majority of Americans (about 75%) apparently believe that immigrants increase crime (New York Times, 2006), a view reinforced by President George W. Bush in a 2006 speech when he stated: A Illegal immigration puts pressure on public schools and hospitals. It strains state and local budgets and brings crime to our communities (Bush, 2006). Substantively, because social scientists have abiding interests in divisions in society and whether those divisions are diminishing or deepening, there is renewed interest in recent years within sociology and the social sciences more generally in whether the foreign-born are being assimilated or fully integrated into their host society. The growth in Latino immigrants is especially high; population projections estimate that by 2010, more than 15% of the U.S. population will be Latino and by 2050, Latinos will account for nearly 30% of all U.S. residents (Passel & Cohn, 2008; U.S. Census Bureau, 2004). This growth has generated widespread concerns in both the popular and scientific press about possible increases in crime and other social problems brought on by increasing Latino immigration. As a result, and similar to what their predecessors had faced at the beginning of the 20th century, sociologists and their colleagues in cognate fields (e.g., criminologists) are faced with the task of trying again to understand the impact of immigration on our society and on the immigrants themselves. Despite its gravity, there is a shortage of empirical research that examines the impact of immigration on homicide, especially at the aggregate level. Though immigrants may engage in less crime than their native-born counterparts (Butcher & Piehl, 1998; Greenman & Xie, 2007; Hagan & Palloni, 1999), the ecological impact of immigration on rates of crime is more complex and unclear. For example, higher rates of immigration might increase crime by disrupting social conditions in ways that affect particular areas or groups more so than otherssuch as U.S.-born African Americans, whose employment opportunities may be most affected by changes in immigration flows. Though several aggregate-level studies represent significant empirical and conceptual advances (e.g., Lee, Martinez, & Rosenfeld, 2001; Martinez, Stowell, & Cancino, 2008; Reid, Weiss, Adelman, & Jaret, 2005), there are some gaps in the extant research that we seek to address in our study by combining 2000 U.S. census data and 2000 California homicide arrest data. These include examining (a) the macrolevel effects of immigration on homicide offending rates (whereas previous research has targeted homicide victimization rates); (b) immigrations effects both on overall homicide offending rates and across racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Latino); and (c) we use census places as unique, untapped study units that vary considerably along a number of dimensions such as size, homicide rates, racial/ethnic composition, and socioecological characteristics. As several reviews indicate (Lee et al., 2001; Martinez & Lee, 2000; Reid et al., 2005), there are alternative views of the likely effects of aggregate patterns of immigration on homicide.

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Immigration increases homicide. First, immigration may increase crime by selecting populations with greater criminal tendencies than native-born populations (i.e., young males in the age group of 18 to 34 years) or by importing cultural practices and norms (e.g., attitudes favorable for employing violence as a response to disputes) that foster higher levels of crime or violence (Horowitz, 2001; Taft, 1933). Second, anomie/strain and social disorganization perspectives suggest that, even if immigrants do not have criminal tendencies when they enter the United States, they may be drawn into crime in response to the structural hardships and criminal opportunities extant in their new communities (see reviews in Mears, 2001; Sutherland & Cressey, 1960). Third, immigration flows may increase crime by destabilizing the local community and exacerbating its structural disadvantage context in ways that diminish community cohesion and informal social controls needed to prevent crime among both foreign-born and U.S.-born populations in highly immigrant-populated areas (see reviews in Healey, 2006; Stowell, 2007; Sutherland & Cressey, 1960). Immigration decreases homicide. There are also plausible reasons for hypothesizing that immigration may actually reduce crime and violence. First, immigrants may be less involved in crime than their native-born counterparts due to selective in-outmigration to the United States, which produces a foreign-born population with a more favorable profile for social and economic assimilation and fewer motivations for crime (Gonzlez, 2000; Light & Gold, 2000; Tonry, 1997), and also because fears of deportation provide immigrants with strong incentives to avoid criminal offending (Butcher & Piehl, 1998). Second, at the aggregate level, immigrant concentration may dampen levels of violence by helping to stabilize and invigorate minority communities. Drawing from the social capital perspective and from research on immigrant assimilation and cultural transmission, immigrant presence (especially the growth in Latino and Mexican immigrants) may contribute to protective community-level forcesreinforcing the traditional culture of residents, increasing attachments to the labor force and traditional family structures, and fostering community resources and serviceswhich help to mitigate the stressful effects of disadvantage and provide buffers against crime (see reviews in Light & Gold, 2000; Martinez, 2002; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). Immigration has neutral or race/ethnicity-specific effects. It also is plausible that immigration has little or no overall effect on violenceeither through null effects of immigration or as a result of offsetting violence-generating and violence-reducing effects of immigration. Immigrant flows may destabilize communities by exacerbating poverty and other structural constraints, but at the same time provide residents with protective resources that offset any of the disorganizing effects of immigration (Stowell, 2007). Alternatively, it also is plausible that the effects of immigration on homicide vary across racial/ethnic groups and do so in ways that lead to little or no effect on overall violence rates. For example, some evidence suggests that immigration

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contributes to economic and suburban growth that benefits Whites but magnifies economic stagnation and economically marginalizes minority Black populations (e.g., displacing Black workers; Adelman & Tolnay, 2003; Waldinger, 1997); if so, on one hand immigration may increase the economic opportunities and reduce crime for some racial/ethnic groups (e.g., Whites and Latinos) but on the other hand may elevate relative deprivation and rates of offending of native-born Blacks.

The Current Study

Using race/ethnicity-disaggregated data on homicide offending from California, the present study seeks to build on the extant aggregate-level studies that have examined the immigrationhomicide relationship. We highlight the following conclusions from prior research (see reviews in Martinez et al., 2008; Peterson & Krivo, 2005; Stowell, 2007): (a) Research on the topic is scarce and mostly involves the pioneering neighborhood studies conducted by Martinez and colleagues; (b) The existing studies focus exclusively on homicide victimization, due largely to the limited availability of data on homicide offending disaggregated by race/ethnicity (e.g., arrest data that include Latino identifiers); (c) Findings from these studies tend to show that immigrant concentration has either negative (violence-reducing) or trivial effects (not significant) on overall rates of homicide victimization; and (d) The findings are ambiguous about the effects of immigration on homicide across racial or ethnic groups. Notably, several studies report small differences in the effects of immigration on Black and Latino homicide victimization, but there is little in the way of consistency in the direction or magnitude of the effects; that is, various combinations of negative and null effects of immigration on homicide (with a few positive effects) for both Blacks and Latinos are reported, depending on the study location, offense type, and unit of analysis. Our goal is to build on these prior studies and to contribute empirically to the immigrationhomicide literature in four major ways. First, we focus on homicide offending rather than victimization. Although homicide victimization patterns provide a useful measure of violence and may closely reflect offending patterns, their relationships with immigration may vary across places or race/ethnicity. For example, immigration may result in greater targeting of immigrant groups for victimization committed by U.S.-born populations but not necessarily a greater willingness among immigrants to offend. Also, though we might assume strong similarities in victimoffender demographics among Whites (about 85% are within race) and among Blacks (about 90% are within race), the victimoffender pattern is unknown for Latinos. The second way is by helping to arbitrate between the competing positions outlined earlier as to whether immigration has violence-generating, violence-reducing,

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neutral/trivial effects, or race- and ethnicity-specific effects on homicide. Though several studies have examined immigration effects on both Latino and Black homicide victimization (Lee et al., 2001; Nielsen, Lee, & Martinez, 2005), the main focus of previous research has been on the effects of immigration on total homicides (Martinez, 2000; Reid et al., 2005) or specifically on Latino homicides (Martinez, 2000). As a result, the evidence is particularly scarce about whether immigration may have different effects on homicide across racial/ethnicity groups such as Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. The California arrest data allow us to investigate differences in the effects of immigrant concentration on overall homicide offending rates as well as on White, Black, and Latino homicideas compared to uniform crime report (UCR) and other official crime data sources that have less detailed information on offender race/ethnicity (Demuth, 2003). Third, we extend the extant immigrationhomicide research using census places as a unique and relatively untapped ecological unit of analysis. Census places include a variety of nonoverlapping geographic areas tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau that range from small towns to mid-sized and large cities and that vary widely in structural characteristics and rates of violence. As study units, census places are well suited for this analysis because they not only provide greater spatial homogeneity compared to higher levels of aggregation (states, counties, metropolitan statistical areas; see Shihadeh & Shrum, 2004) but also provide adequate counts of homicide and large enough racial/ethnic populations for meaningful statistical analysis. Also, there is a need to examine the immigrationhomicide relationship across a variety of study units (neighborhoods, counties, states) for purposes of establishing the robustness and generalizability of findings. Fourth, by using 19992001 data, we provide a timely reflection of the association between contemporary immigration presence and rates of homicide. Moreover, because California is the nations most highly immigrant-populated state, our study addresses a notable portion of the immigrationcrime relationship for the country as a whole. Specifically, California is home to approximately 10 million immigrants and more than 25% of all foreign-born residents in the United States. It also accounts for more than 38% of all Mexican immigrants and approximately 30% of all immigrants from other Central American countries living in the United States (Pew Hispanic Center, 2006).

Data
We use data from two main sources. First, information on total and race-disaggregated homicide arrests are drawn from Californias crime reporting program (CAL). Second, 2000 U.S. census data (Summary files 1 and 4) are used to generate information on immigration patterns and social and economic characteristics of the total, White, Black, and Latino populations.

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Dependent Variables
The dependent variables in this study are census placelevel Black, White, Latino, and total arrest counts for homicide. We include only those census places that have a total population of 10,000 or above in the year 2000 and have at least 1,000 residents of the racial/ethnic group under consideration. This yields 328 census places for the total and White population models, 320 for the Latino population analysis, and 176 for the Black population analysis.1 Arrest data are subject to many well-known criticisms, but homicide is viewed as the most serious of index crimes and the index offense most reliably reported to the police and likely to result in arrest (Steffensmeier & Haynie, 2000). We also introduce law enforcement officers per capita as a control for differences in police presence across census places that could bias comparisons of race-specific homicide offending rates. Last, to add stability and ensure adequate arrest counts in our measures of homicide, we use 3-year averaged homicide arrest figures for the 1999-2001 period.2

Independent Variables.
Our primary variable of interest, immigrant concentration, is measured as the percentage of the population that is foreign-born and entered the United States between 1990 and 2000.3 In addition, to take into account the structural characteristics of localities in which immigrants settle, we selected key control variables on theoretical grounds and drawing from prior empirical research on immigration and homicide (e.g., Lee et al., 2001; Martinez, 2000; Nielsen et al., 2005). First, we used principal components analysis to create structural disadvantage indices for the total population and each racial/ethnic group. The disadvantage index combines the percentage of residents who are in poverty, the percentage of males who are at least 16 years old and are unemployed or not in the labor force, and the percentage of residents aged more than 25 years who are high school graduates (or equivalent). Second, other control variables include family structure, measured as the percentage of families (Black, White, Latino, and total) with children aged less than 18 years that are headed by a female;4 residential mobility, defined as the percentage of total households that experienced a change in residents during the 1995-2000 period; young male population, defined as the percentage of males in the age range of 15 to 24 in each racial/ethnic group and the total population; population size, as the logged total census place population; population density, as the number of persons per square mile of land; and police presence, as the number of full-time law enforcement officers/1,000 census place residents.5 Last, we include a control for racial/ethnic heterogeneity using a three-group (Black, White, and Latino) entropy index score calculated for each census place (Reardon & Firebaugh, 2002). The entropy index (E) is a multigroup measure of the diversity of census places, calculated as

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E=

m=1

M X

pm ln1=pm

where, m is the proportion of people in race/ethnicity m, and M is the number of racial/ethnic groups. E has a minimum value of 0 in census places consisting entirely of one racial/ethnic group and a maximum value of 1 when Blacks, Whites, and Latinos have equal representation.6 Because homicide is a rare event and is not normally distributed across census places (even using logarithmic transformations), ordinary least square (OLS) models of homicide are not appropriate for this analysis. Instead, we use negative binomial models (which can account for the nonnormal distribution of homicides) to estimate the effects of immigration on overall and race/ethnicity-disaggregated homicides (Lee et al., 2001; Stowell, 2007).

Findings
Means and standard deviations for all variables are presented in Table 1. It is clear that homicide rates vary across race/ethnicity, with Whites having the lowest average rates (2.6/100,000), followed by Latinos (7.2/100,000), and then Blacks (12.1/100,000). In addition, there exists considerable variation in homicide offending patterns within each racial/ethnic group across census place localities that is obscured when only mean levels of offending are reported. Examination of standard deviation values reveals substantial variability in total and race/ethnicity-specific homicide rates, indicating that there are census places with few or no homicides as well as places with extraordinarily high levels of White, Black, and Latino homicides. The descriptive statistics also reveal substantial differences in structural disadvantage and socioeconomic well-being across race/ethnicity. Compared to Latinos and Blacks, White populations generally have the most favorable structural circumstances, including higher graduation rates, lower levels of poverty, and relatively fewer female-headed families. Patterns of structural well-being shown in Table 1 are more mixed for LatinoBlack comparisons. Although Latinos and Blacks have similar levels of poverty, Latinos experience lower rates of unemployment and female-headed families, whereas Blacks have higher graduation rates.

Multivariate Analyses
Table 2 presents the results of negative binomial models examining the effects of immigration on homicide offending for the total population and for the disaggregated racial groups (White, Black, Latino). All models include the control variables (e.g., population size, residential mobility, heterogeneity, police presence, and the

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Table 1 Means and Standard Deviations for Variables by Race and Ethnicity
Mean Total White Standard Dev Latino Black

4.71 5.73 2.59 4.89 7.21 11.6 12.06 22.69 Dependent (arrest rates/ 100,000) Homicideab Independent Immigrant 8.44 5.35 8.26 5.27 8.69 5.34 8.8 4.85 concentration Population size 78981 227880 78981 227880 82249 233194 121226 304667 Population density 4834.48 3680.62 4834.48 3680.62 4926.99 3733.64 4924.76 3395.19 7.1 2.06 5.42 1.86 9.31 2.62 8.09 4.22 Young male populationb Police presence (per 1.13 0.79 1.13 0.79 1.13 0.79 1.08 0.64 1,000 residents) Residential mobility 49.8 6.84 49.93 6.83 50.23 6.43 51.26 6.44 0 1.06 0 1.07 0 0.87 0 0.9 Structural disadvantageb 12.54 7.69 8.05 5.02 17.4 8.76 17.31 9.7 Percentage of povertyb Percentage of 23.78 6.76 25.69 9.18 20.17 5.32 27.97 11.29 unemployed malesb 77.21 16.04 87.77 7.8 57.05 16.66 85.01 8.21 Percentage of high school graduatesb Racial/ethnic 0.56 0.24 0.56 0.24 0.58 0.23 0.72 0.16 heterogeneity 10.03 3.82 7.99 3.63 12.6 4.07 22.9 10.23 Percentage of femaleheaded households with kidsb 328 328 320 176 N Note: Variables that are not race/ethnicity specific (e.g., total population, density) may have different values across columns due to differences in sample size across race/ethnicity based on selection criteria (>1,000 residents of the racial/ethnic group). a. Rates/100,000 used here. b. Variable is race/ethnicity specific.

disadvantage index). Significant immigration effects on homicide (and effects of control variables) are indicated by asterisks. We turn first to the control variables in our models (Table 2). We find that population density, residential mobility, family structure, young-male population, and police per capita have trivial to small effects on homicide offending across the comparison groups as a whole, whereas population size, racial/ethnic heterogeneity, and the disadvantage index have moderately stronger and more consistent effects. Localities with larger population size, greater racial/ethnic heterogeneity, and greater disadvantage tend to have higher homicide offending levels overall and among White, Black, and Latino residents. These patterns are generally consistent with aggregate research that uses total rates based on offenses reported to police or rates based on alternative study units such as U.S. counties or cities (Harer & Steffensmeier, 1992; Peterson & Krivo, 2005; Shihadeh & Steffensmeier, 1994).

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Table 2 Negative Binomial and SUR Homicide Models for Total, White, Latino, and Black Populations
Total b Immigrant concentration Population size (logged) Population density Police presence Young male population Residential Mobility Structural disadvantage Racial/ethnic heterogeneity Percentage of female-headed households Constant Log likelihood SUR modelsa Immigrant concentration 0.015 (0.019) 1.055** (0.086) White b 0.043* (0.021) 1.026** (0.109) Latino b 0.026 (0.020) 0.878** (0.091) Black b 0.060* (0.030) 1.206** (0.141)

4.26E-07 (2.35E-05) 3.49E-05 (3.03E-05) 2.25E-05 (2.50E-05) 9.08E-05* (4.06E-05) 0.031 (0.096) 0.065 (0.047) 0.016 (0.012) 0.455** (0.113) 0.820* (0.370) 0.084** (0.030) 0.248* (0.114) 0.027 (0.053) 0.006 (0.017) 0.240* (0.103) 0.653 (0.438) 0.055 (0.033) 0.080 (0.111) 0.146** (0.054) 0.029* (0.014) 1.097** (0.133) 0.994* (0.405) 0.019 (0.024) 0.184 (0.192) 0.051 (0.051) 0.010 (0.023) 0.564** (0.144) 4.918** (0.917) 0.006 (0.015)

10.240** (0.955) 790.872 .009

11.876** (1.200) 443.544 .082

7.019** (1.143) 611.086 .071

16.264** (1.959) 266.206 .019

Note: SUR = seemingly unrelated regression. Standard errors are shown in parenthesis. a. Standardized coefficients are shown for the SUR models. SUR models also include all control variables shown in the negative binomial models. Square root transformations were applied to homicide rates in SUR models to adjust for skewness and obtain more normally distributed dependent variables. *p < .05. **p < .01.

We turn now to the central issue of our study, the immigrationhomicide relationships for the total and Black, White, and Latino populations net of controls for social and economic characteristics of census place localities where immigrants tend to settle. We especially are interested here in assessing competing claims about the effects of immigration on homicide offendingwhether recent immigration inflates/ lessens homicide across census places and whether immigration has similar effects on race-disaggregated levels of homicide (i.e., White, Black, Latino).7 As displayed in Table 2, we findfirst, that immigration has a positive effect on overall levels of homicide offending. However, the effect is nonsignificant or essentially trivial (b = .015), indicating that immigration does not inflate total homicide offending across census places, net of controls for structural conditions characterizing those localities.

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Second, we find some differences in the effects of immigration on homicide when the overall rates are disaggregated by race/ethnicity. Immigration has a small, nonsignificant positive effect on Latino homicide offending (b = .026), whereas the effects of immigration are negative and marginally significant on White homicide (b = .043, p < .05) and on Black homicide offending (b = .060, p < .05). Though an increase in immigrant presence tends to reduce levels of homicide offending among White and Black residents, it is important to acknowledge the borderline nature of these homicide-reducing effects(a) that they are based on the marginal significance of the coefficients (t values were approximately 2.00 for what is a fairly large sample of localities) and (b) that these effects dropped out of significance in supplemental analyses (seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) and population size disaggregated models) that are described below. Nonetheless, the small homicidereducing effect of immigration on Black homicide is noteworthy in light of recent arguments suggesting that immigration contributes to greater Black violence, for example, by displacing Black workers and creating intergroup conflict with immigrant populations (Adelman & Tolnay, 2003; Waldinger, 1997).

Supplemental Analysis
To strengthen the validity of the above results, we first examined whether the inclusion and equal weighting of small and large census places in the same sample might be compromising our findings. We repeated all regressionsfirst, by introducing interaction terms between census place population and immigrant concentration; second, by using three population sizedisaggregated subsamples for small (<25,000), medium (25,000 to 59,999), and large (60,000+) census placesas based on natural breaks in the data that provided sufficient cases to statistically assess immigration effects on homicide. The results parallel those reported above indicating that immigration effects are small or trivial. Specifically, the interaction term between population size and immigration failed to reach significance for all groups. In addition, the population sizedisaggregated models produced only one significant immigration effect (i.e., a negative effect of immigration on Black homicide in large census places) across 12 comparisons (results available on request).8 Second, we repeated all regressions by introducing a specific measure of Latino immigration, defined as percent of the population comprised of foreign-born Latino residents who arrived between 1990 and 2000. Our objective here was to address whether Latino immigration (rather than total immigration) may have unique effects, in particular, on Black rates of homicide. We find that Latino immigration had trivial or nonsignificant effects on all the outcomes, that is, on total homicides as well as on levels of homicide among Whites, Latinos, and Blacks.9 Last, we repeated all models using SUR procedures commonly used in aggregatelevel studies of crime to assess differences in effects of structural predictors across population groups (Schwartz, 2006; Steffensmeier & Haynie, 2000; Zellner, 1963).

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As compared to negative binomial models, SUR techniques provide more straightforward methods for estimating standardized coefficients that indicate the relative strength of immigration effects on homicide.10 As shown at the bottom of Table 2, SUR results reveal no significant effects of immigration on homicide for any of the groups examined; the standardized coefficient values are essentially trivial or near zero across all groups. Several noteworthy implications emerge from these findings compared to the negative binomial results described above. On the one hand, the SUR results mirror the negative binomial findings in that they are clearly at odds with the homicide-generating thesis about the effects of immigration for total, White, Black, or Latino populations. On the other hand, the SUR findings also provide little in the way of support for the homicide-reducing thesis and further suggest that the violence-reducing effects of immigration for White and Black populations observed in the negative-binomial models should be interpreted with caution. Taken together (including the supplemental analyses), we interpret the results as indicating that immigration has weak or trivial effects, neither contributing to nor substantially reducing homicide.

Summary and Conclusions

Our objective in this study was to empirically address a number of issues that have not been fully explored in the existing literature on the macrolevel relationship between immigration and homicide. Using recent arrest data from California, we examined the impact of immigration presence at the census place level on overall and race/ethnic-disaggregated (White, Black, Latino) levels of homicide offending. As noted earlier, previous aggregate-level research on the immigrationhomicide link has focused on homicide victimization and has relied on neighborhoods or standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs) as the study unit. Notably, two key aims of our analysis were to consider whether the findings from these prior studies would extend to analyses of homicide offending (rather than victimization) and when using an alternative spatial locale as the study unit. A third, overlapping aim was to assess competing claims about immigration and homicide offending, that is, whether recent immigration inflates homicide across census place localities or lessens it and whether immigration has similar/distinct effects on race/ethnicity-disaggregated levels of homicide. Our key findings are as follows. First, net of controls, we find that immigration has negligible or trivial effects on overall levels of homicide offending across census place localities in California. Second, immigration effects also tend to be small when the overall rates are disaggregated to allow for comparisons across racial/ethnic groups; namely, immigration has a negligible (positive) effect on Latino homicide offending as compared to a small (negative) effect on White and Black offending levels. The null/negative effect of immigration on Black homicide is noteworthy in light of concerns that increased immigration may contribute to Black unemployment and crime.

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The significance and potential generalizability of these findings are further enhanced because they are consistent with overall results from previous studies on the immigrationhomicide link and because our analysis added important dimensions to those studies (i.e., comparison of effects across multiple racial/ethnic populations, use of an alternative geographical spatial study unit, and using homicide offending as outcome measure). Notably, the findings are at odds with the violence-generating thesis derived from conventional anomiedisorganization perspectives, which suggests that immigrant flows tend to destabilize community-level structural circumstances and foster criminogenic cultural adaptations in ways that elevate levels of violent offending or victimization. Instead, our results (along with those reported by other researchers) are more consistent with the emerging violence-neutral or violence-reducing perspectives that suggest that immigration may have some protective or buffering effects against crime (and perhaps other social problems) by strengthening conventional social institutions, increasing attachments to the labor force and traditional family structures, and fostering community resources and social services (see reviews in Light & Gold, 2000; Martinez, 2002; Reid et al., 2005; Tienda & Mitchell, 2006). As Americans have become increasingly concerned about the recent wave of immigration and its impact on the overall social and economic well-being of American society, the need has become greater for criminologists and social scientists to offer empirical assessments of the effects of immigration on violence and other social problems. Among other priorities, research is needed (a) that evaluates whether our findings are generalizable to locations outside California with different immigration population profiles and racial/ethnic compositions and dynamics; (b) that clarifies the scope conditions under which immigration affects violence by exploring variations in immigrationcrime relationships across population characteristics other than race/ethnicity (including gender and juvenile vs. adult) and across structural circumstances; and (c) that moves beyond cross-sectional data analysis toward increased use of longitudinal data or time-series designs that are better able to establish the causal ordering of effects of immigration on violence as well as potential reciprocal effects or selection effects in this relationship. As in all crosssectional analyses, for example, it is difficult to determine the degree to which immigration shapes violence versus whether immigrant populations are funneled into communities with certain structural characteristics and patterns of offending; (d) that includes offenses other than homicide, such as robbery and assault as well as nonviolent property crimes and illegal drug offenses (for initial efforts in this regard, see Reid et al., 2005; Stowell, 2007); (e) that, when focusing on violence, includes both violent victimization and violent offending as outcome measures; and (f) that includes a broader range of study units (e.g., census places, counties, neighborhoods) and data from both traditional immigrant destinations (e.g., Florida, California, New York) and nontraditional locations (e.g., North Carolina, Tennessee). It is most crucial perhaps that researchers and policy makers begin to address the severe shortfalls of data availability that hampers racial/ethnic-disaggregated research on the immigrationcrime relationship. Information on Latino offending

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remains surprisingly scarce, particularly considering recent growth in Latino immigration and populations coupled with increasing concerns and debate over the effects of these changes on crime. If research on race/ethnicity, immigration, and crime is to move beyond standard WhiteBlack comparisons and beyond examination of victimization patterns, more refined information on race/ethnicity-specific offending patterns must become available. But until more research is forthcoming, the findings from our study are cautiously instructivecontemporary immigration does not inflate community levels of homicide offending (net of controls) but instead may actually slightly dampen those levels.

Notes
1. In California, cities and towns may be considered for incorporation if they meet the state requirement of 500 registered voters (U.S. Census Bureau, 1994). Several smaller census places were excluded from the analysis because arrest data were not available at the agency level (14 in California). In addition, our sample includes only incorporated census places due to the limited availability of arrest figures for census- designated places. 2. The CAL data were obtained from the California Bureau of Criminal Information and Analysis (19992001). CAL data treat Hispanic ethnicity as a separate racial/ethnic category from White, Black, and Other racial groups but do not separate Latinos into more refined categories, such as White-Hispanics, Black-Hispanics, or by national origin (e.g., Mexican, Cuban). 3. These measures include both documented and undocumented immigrants because accurate estimates of documented/undocumented immigration are not readily available at the census place level. Census estimates may underestimate true levels of immigration due to underreporting among foreignborn populations, particularly among Latinos (Bean, Corona, Tuiran, Woodrow-Lafield, & Van Hook, 2001). Currently, it is unknown how much patterns of underreporting covary with crime across place and possibly shape immigrationcrime relationships. 4. Poverty, unemployment, and education loaded strongly onto a single factor (factor loadings >.68) for the total population and each racial/ethnic group. Because family structure did not load strongly on this factor (less than .50), it is included as a separate predictor. 5. Counts of law enforcement officers were drawn from agency-level UCR (Uniform Crime Report) data, which were aggregated to the census place level using the 2000 UCR Crosswalk file (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004). 6. Racial/ethnic heterogeneity was divided by its maximum value of approximately 1.099 to make E values range from 0 to 1 and to make results more easily interpretable. 7. Examination of bivariate correlation coefficients reveals positive associations between measures of percent foreign-born and homicide. Specifically, immigrant concentration is significantly correlated with total (r = .219, p < .01) and Latino homicides (r = .13, p < .05) but is not significantly related to White (r = .09) or Black homicides (r = .09) based on the zero-order correlations. Preliminary diagnostics (e.g., variance inflation factor values, examination of bivariate correlations) indicate no collinearity problems among independent and control variables. 8. We were unable to estimate the model predicting Black homicide for small places because the sample contained few small places with at least 1,000 Black residents. 9. We also performed preliminary analyses using total and race/ethnicity-disaggregated robbery rates as dependent measures to assess the consistency of immigrationviolence relationships across offenses. Results from these models were substantively similar to the homicide results. 10. Seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) techniques provide more efficient estimates of effects when comparing multiple population subgroups within a common sample of aggregate spatial units (e.g., multiple racial/ethnic groups in a common set of census places) by simultaneously estimating models for

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all groups after weighting models based on correlated errors across groups (for detailed discussions of SUR techniques, see Schwartz, 2006; Zellner, 1963). We assigned a value of 0.01 to the homicide rates before they were log transformed in those census places and for those groups reporting no homicides over the 3-year period (see Steffensmeier & Haynie, 2000). Because SUR can only be applied to a common set of spatial units, SUR models were limited to the 176 census places that housed at least 1,000 residents of all three racial/ethnic groups.

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Ben Feldmeyer is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee. His research focuses on criminal behavior and criminal sentencing and their intersection with race/ethnicity and immigration, social class, social context, and other demographic groups (i.e., age and gender). Recent papers on these topics appeared in Research on Aging, Social Science Research, and Sociological Viewpoints. Current research projects include a study of recent trends in girls and boys violence, a comparison of the effects of racial/ethnic residential isolation on violence among Black and Latino populations, and an assessment of racial and ethnic similarities/differences in the structural predictors of violence (i.e., White, Black, and Latino comparisons).

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Darrell Steffensmeier is a professor of sociology and criminology at Pennsylvania State University. He is past president of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime, a fellow of the American Society of Criminology, the recipient of numerous National Science Foundation awards for funded research, and has authored articles on a range of law/criminology topics in major social science and criminology outlets. He is author of The Fence: In the Shadow of Two Worlds (recipient of 1987 Crime & Delinquency outstanding scholarship award from Society for the Study of Social Problems) and, with Jeffery Ulmer, Confessions of a Dying Thief: Understanding Criminal Careers and Illegal Enterprise (recipient of 2006 Hindelang Award for outstanding scholarship from American Society of Criminology). His current research and writing focuses on applying multiple methods and data sources into examinations of the effects of gender, age, and race/ethnicity on patterns and trends in crime; further developing the gendered paradigm of female offending; and expanding on key themes raised in Confessions of a Dying Thief.

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