Immigration and Criminality: Australia's Post‐War Inquiries

Abstract

The relationship between immigration and crime rates has long been a topic of robust debate in criminology and sociology, especially for scholars of the United States. Researchers in those fields have highlighted divergent factors to explain high arrest rates including the presence of ethnic gangs, media reporting, racial profiling, over-policing of immigrant communities, and wider issues of social dislocation brought about by migration. By contrast, historians have given little consideration to the topic. This lack of historical investigation is particularly curious in studies of Australia's post-war immigration given the political importance of the issue at the time. Immigration and criminality -or more precisely, whether immigrants committed more crime or worse crimes than the Australian-born population -became a prominent topic of media coverage and political interest in the early 1950s. In fact, the question of migrants' criminality was so important that it was the subject of the first research inquiries ever ordered by the Department of Immigration. Our article examines this research, explaining the impetus for the inquiries, their findings, and their historical significance. We conclude by outlining how this topic can illuminate new areas of inquiry in immigration history.

Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Filicide Perpetration Trends: Filicide in Victoria, 1860–1920

“…This article takes the position that historical criminology is best defined as criminology done in a historical mode (Churchill 2019) because historical criminology is 'the only methodologically robust means by which to evaluate the potential for the past to help explain the present' (Lawrence 2019: 493). Using archival sources to create richer and clearer continuities and dislocations between the past and the present has been successfully applied to topics of penal history (Cox and Godfrey 2020; Guiney 2018; Nagy and Piper 2020, 2019; Piper and Nagy 2017, 2018), policing (Churchill 2018;Finnane 1990), immigration (Kaladelfos and Finnane 2018), and crime prevention (Churchill 2016). Therefore, the focus of this article is on creating a historical work of criminology, rather than writing the history of crime-this distinction is an important one.…”