Immigration cuts crime?

An op-ed piece in the New York Times suggests that there may be a link between increasing Mexican immigration and falling crime.

The emerging story goes against the grain of popular stereotypes. Among the public, policymakers and even academics, a common expectation is that a concentration of immigrants and an influx of foreigners drive up crime rates, because of the assumed propensities of these groups to commit crimes and settle in poor, presumably disorganized communities. This belief is so pervasive, studies show, that the concentration of Latinos in a neighborhood strongly predicts perceptions of disorder no matter what the actual amount of crime and disorder.

Yet our study found that immigrants appear in general to be less violent than people born in America, particularly when they live in neighborhoods with high numbers of other immigrants. We are thus witnessing a different pattern from early 20th-century America, when growth in immigration from Europe was linked with increasing crime and formed a building block for what became known as "social disorganization" theory.