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Latino Immigrant Acculturation and Crime

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Abstract

Recent debate on the future of immigration policy in the United States has spawned much discussion on social costs and consequences for immigrants, such as employment, education, health care, and most notably, crime. Although recent Latino immigrants are often portrayed as outsiders in popular media, their successful acculturation into the American way of life may present more crime-related risk rather than less. This study examines arrest records for Latinos in two southwestern American cities to determine the extent to which Latino acculturation is related to arrests and convictions for both misdemeanors and felonies after controlling for certain legal and extra-legal factors. Results indicate that acculturation is consistently and positively associated with all four crime-related outcomes in this sample. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Scholars have operationalized acculturation in a number of ways. Waters & Jimenez (2005) summarize the common measures of immigrant assimilation frequency used by social scientists, which include socioeconomic status, spatial concentration, language assimilation (in terms of English language ability and loss of mother tongue), and intermarriage.

  2. For the purposes of this analysis, “violent” arrests were defined as those involving homicide, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault.

  3. For the purposes of this analysis, those individuals who were recorded in official records as “self-employed” (n = 445) were recoded to the “employed” category, while the small number of individuals who reported being “retired” (n = 21) were recoded to system-missing.

  4. Although not reported here, a priori bivariate analyses conducted by the authors featured Pearson’s correlations to detect potential problems with collinearity. All correlations were within tolerances. Post-hoc regression diagnostics confirmed this conclusion, with variance inflation factors for all independent variables in the 1.0 to 1.2 range for all four models.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Alex Piquero for feedback on an earlier draft. A previous version of this paper was presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting in November 2008.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Valdosta State University, 1500 N. Patterson St., Valdosta, GA, 31698, USA

    Lorna L. Alvarez-Rivera

  2. College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University, P.O. Box 2296, Huntsville, TX, 77341-2296, USA

    Matt R. Nobles

  3. School of Public Affairs, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Kim M. Lersch

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  1. Lorna L. Alvarez-Rivera
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Correspondence to Lorna L. Alvarez-Rivera.

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Alvarez-Rivera, L.L., Nobles, M.R. & Lersch, K.M. Latino Immigrant Acculturation and Crime. Am J Crim Just 39, 315–330 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-013-9203-9

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