Refining the Immigration-Crime Nexus

The assumption that immigrants are overly involved in crime is deeply rooted in American public opinion. Yet, research published in the last two decades refutes this claim and finds that immigrants are less likely than the native-born to engage in criminal behavior and that immigrant concentration is generally associated with lower levels of community crime. Despite this advancement in the literature, prior work is limited in that it often does not examine recidivism as a measure of offending and whether criminal involvement among immigrants varies across groups. Another pertinent issue is that scholars rarely address the intervening mechanisms that explain the immigration-crime link. The current study addresses these gaps in the research by examining whether legal status and nationality impact recidivism and whether social bonds, inmate visitation, and immigrant concentration account for any group differences in propensity to recidivate. Using data from the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) and various modeling strategies, the results show that legal status is not a predictor of recidivism, but that there is some variation in post-release offending when immigrants are categorized by nationality. However, almost all immigrant groups identified recidivate at a lower rate than natives. The findings also reveal that education (i.e., social bonds) and visitation partially mediate some group differences in recidivism. Overall, the results lend support for separating the foreign-born into more specific groups in future research on immigration and crime.