Just over a decade ago, scholars lamented the fact that criminologists knew very little about the relationship between crime and immigration. Martinez (2006:2), for instance, noted that while studies of immigrants in many social science disciplines have proliferated, "less attention has been paid to immigrant crime or the consequences of immigration on crime, despite an intensified public debate about this topic" (see also Lee et al. 2001:559 and Reid et al. 2005:758). Today, these claims no longer remain valid. Research on the immigration-crime relationship has increased dramatically, ranging from individual-level studies of immigrants to aggregate-level analyses of immigrant concentrations. This growing body of literature yields several key findings. One is that immigrants are generally less crime prone than their native-born counterparts. On average, immigrants commit less crime than the native-born population (

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Scholars have theorized how spatial boundaries (edges) can be important for understanding the location of crime, yet the empirical relationship between spatial boundaries in the environment and levels of crime is relatively less explored compared with other features of the environment. The current study extends the literature by not only studying three types of physical boundaries—interstate highways, parks, and rivers—but also one nonphysical and relatively less visible boundary—city boundaries. We analyze the relationship between crime in street segments and nearness to these four types of edges in the Southern California area. We measure nearness to these boundaries in two manners: (a) whether or not the segment is adjacent to the feature and (b) how far in physical distance the segment is to the feature.

The current study advances the literature by simultaneously accounting for the geographic location of immigrant residences and the location of ethnic businesses, and considers their proximity to one another. We argue our alternative measure, which we term Immigrant Ethnic Activity Space (IEAS), more fully captures the ecology of immigrant communities. Using data from several sources to capture neighborhoods in the Southern California region, we constructed IEAS measures for the seven largest ethnic groups in the region, including groups from Mexico, China, Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Armenia, and El Salvador. These measures reflect where immigrants live and where they go for various ethnic-related routine activities, as well as the distance between the two. We estimated a set of negative binomial regression models to examine the effects of the IEAS measures on neighborhood violent and property crime rates. We find that our IEAS approach is distinct from traditionally-employed measures of immigrant neighborhoods. We also find that IEAS measures have negative associations with both violent and property crime, in general. The current study proposes and develops an alternative approach to conceptualizing immigrant neighborhoods, which more closely aligns with extant theory and should be considered in future research on the immigration-crime nexus. Immigrant-ethnic activity space3 Bio Young-An Kim is an Assistant Professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. His research interests focus on various areas such as neighborhoods and crime, criminology of place, geo-spatial analysis, and immigration and crime. Besides criminology, he is interested in sociology of health, urban sociology, and quantitative research methods.John R. Hipp is a Professor in the departments of Criminology, Law and Society, and Sociology, at the University of California Irvine. His research interests focus on how neighborhoods change over time, how that change both affects and is affected by neighborhood crime, and the role networks and institutions play in that change. He approaches these questions using quantitative methods as well as social network analysis. He has published substantive

His research interests focus on various areas such as neighborhoods and crime, criminology of place, immigration and crime, and geo-spatial analysis. Besides criminology, he is interested in sociology of health, urban sociology, and quantitative research methods.