This research investigates variation in hate crime offending against Arabs and Muslims across U.S. counties in the months before and after September 11, 2001. Four questions are of particular interest. First, what were the determinants of anti-Arab and Muslim hate crimes prior to 9/11? Second, in what social contexts were Arabs and Muslims at greatest risk of victimization? Third, to what extent did hate crimes against these groups increase after the terrorist attacks? And last, did the predictors of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims change appreciably after 9/11? Findings show that hate crimes targeting Arabs and Muslims increased dramatically in the months following 9/11, although the structural determinants and geographic concentration of these crimes remained largely consistent after the attacks. Negative binomial regression results further suggest that counties with larger concentrations of Arabs and Muslims have higher incidents of such hate crimes, which likely reflects the availability of targets for this type of offending. At the same time, the likelihood of victimization for a given Arab or Muslim person is lowest in counties where the percent Arab or percent Muslim is highest, in line with a power-differential perspective on discrimination and intergroup violence. The findings imply that terrorist attacks may indeed incite retaliation and set off a wave of hate crime offending, but the location of these crimes is likely to remain consistent after a galvanizing event.

We investigate the difference that immigrant enclaves make for the residential contexts of Latino families in the U.S. We argue that enclaves may no longer function simply as temporary way stations, the classic depiction of them, because of the compromised legal status of many Latinos. We examine this role with an innovative method that uses publicly available census tabulations (from the 2000 Census in our case) to develop HLM models, in which race/ethnicity and income are controlled at the family level, along with neighbourhood context and metropolitan characteristics. Comparing Latino residential patterns to those of whites and blacks reveals the large neighbourhood disadvantages of Latinos, which except for greater exposure to whites are on the order of those suffered by African Americans. We find that Hispanic families improve their residential situations as their incomes go up and usually also when they live in suburbs. But residence outside of immigrant enclaves produces the largest positive changes. The enclaves are a fundamentally different kind of residential space, in which the potential for neighbourhood improvement is modest.

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Objective This article considers immigration a process that extends beyond numerical size. Processes of assimilation alter the effect of immigration on crime. That means the study is not concerned with direct but with contingent effects. The goal is to demonstrate how paths of segmented assimilation modify the effect of immigration on crime. Methods Combining a data set on neighborhood crime with U.S. Census demographic indicators, this study relies on zero‐inflated negative binomial regression models to examine variation in neighborhood levels of homicide and property offenses as a consequence of interactions between immigration size and assimilation patterns. Results and Discussion Immigrant assimilation moderates the effect of immigration size on crime. Controlling for neighborhood disadvantage, when the probability of downward assimilation is high, immigration size reduces neighborhood safety. When the probability is low, immigration size enhances it. The effects are more robust for homicide regression models with recent immigrants and immigrants with limited linguistic skills. Conclusion The analyses highlight the benefits of contingent models for understanding the relationship between immigration and crime.

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