The theory that immigration is responsible for crime, that the most recent “wave of immigration,” whatever the nationality, is less desirable than the old ones, that all newcomers should be regarded with an attitude of suspicion, is a theory that is almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast. —Edith Abbott in the report of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (1931:23)
Abstract
The major government commissions on immigration and crime in the early twentieth century relied on evidence that suffered from aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data, which led them to present partial and sometimes misleading views of the immigrant-native criminality comparison. With improved data and methods, we find that in 1904, prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity for all ages except ages 18 and 19, for which the commitment rate for immigrants was higher than for the native-born. By 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older, but this advantage disappears when one looks at commitments for violent offenses. The time series pattern reflects a growing gap between natives and immigrants at older ages, one that was driven by sharp increases in the commitment rates of the native-born, while commitment rates for the foreign-born were remarkably stable.
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The authors thank Rutgers University's Research Council for financial support of this project. We also thank the participants of the NBER Summer Institute, Northwestern University Economic History Workshop, the Western Economic Association annual meeting, the University of Maryland Crime and Population Dynamics Workshop, and the University of Colorado Economics Seminar for their helpful comments and suggestions.
An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0038-z.
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Moehling, C., Piehl, A.M. Immigration, crime, and incarceration in early twentieth-century america. Demography 46, 739–763 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.0.0076
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.0.0076