The Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Changes in Neighborhood Crime Rates

Objectives This study investigated the extent to which immigrant concentration is associated with reductions in neighborhood crime rates in the City of Los Angeles. Methods A potential outcomes model using two-stage least squares regression was estimated, where immigrant concentration levels in 1990 were used as an instrumental variable to predict immigrant concentration levels in 2000. The instrumental variables design was used to reduce selection bias in estimating the effect of immigrant concentration on changes in official crime rates between 2000 and 2005 for census tracts in the City of Los Angeles, holding constant other demographic variables and area-level fixed effects. Non-parametric smoothers were also employed in a two-stage least squares regression model to control for the potential influence of heterogeneity in immigrant concentration on changes in crime rates. Results The results indicate that greater predicted concentrations of immigrants in neighborhoods are linked to significant reductions in crime. The results are robust to a number of different model specifications. Conclusions The findings challenge traditional ecological perspectives that link immigrant settlement to higher rates of crime. Immigration settlement patterns appear to be associated with reducing the social burden of crime. Study conclusions are limited by the potential for omitted variables that may bias the observed relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood crime rates, and the use of only official crime data which may under report crimes committed against immigrants. Understanding whether immigrant Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the 2008 Annual Workshop on Crime and Population Dynamics, MD and the 2008 American Society of Criminology meetings, St. Louis, MO. J. M. MacDonald (&) Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, McNeil Building, Suite 483, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6286, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. R. Hipp University of California, Irvine, CA, USA C. Gill George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA 123 J Quant Criminol DOI 10.1007/s10940-012-9176-8 Author's personal copy