Immigration and Recidivism: What Is the Link?

Immigration in an Era of Mass Reentry: Does Immigrant Concentration Guard Against Serious Recidivism?

“…The first limitation is that the analysis only focuses on one state. While Florida offers a suitable context to examine this issue given its large immigrant and prisoner population, the findings may not apply to other regions (Ramos and Wenger 2019). Future research, therefore, should replicate this study in other states to assess the generalizability of the findings.…”

“…Contemporary scholarship on immigration and crime has primarily focused on examining the impact of immigrant status and immigrant concentration on a variety of criminological outcomes. At the individual level, studies consistently demonstrate that immigrants engage in fewer crimes than the native-born (Bersani and DiPietro 2016; Ramos and Wenger 2019). Similarly, studies at the ecological level find that immigration is often related to lower rates of crime or yields no effect (Barranco, Harris, and Feldmeyer 2017; Ousey and Kubrin 2017).…”

The Effect of Legal Status on Prison Misconduct

“…Given this concern, it is logical to assume that foreign-born persons will avoid violating prison rules because doing so will only heighten their chances of being removed from the country (Ugelvik & Damsa, 2018). This effect, we argue, should serve as a greater deterrent for those foreignborn prisoners who are undocumented because they have the highest probability of being deported (Ramos & Wenger, 2020;Wong et al, 2015). For this reason, undocumented inmates should have lower rates of prisoner misconduct than documented individuals.…”

“…The major insight derived from this emerging body of work is that immigrants display lower levels of criminal offending than their native-born counterparts (e.g., Bersani, 2014; Sampson et al, 2005). Research shows that foreign-born persons have lower rates of drug use (Katz et al, 2011), participation in violent and nonviolent behavior (Vaughn & Salas-Wright, 2018), arrest (Jennings et al, 2013), incarceration (Butcher & Piehl, 1998), and reoffending (Ramos & Wenger, 2020) than U.S.-born residents. Studies have also documented an analogous relationship at the ecological level (e.g., Ousey & Kubrin, 2009; Sampson et al, 2005; Stowell et al, 2009), showing that areas with higher immigration rates often have lower levels of neighborhood crime than other similarly situated communities.…”

“…Although research shows that immigrants have lower rates of crime than natives, relatively little is known about the offending behaviors of foreign-born individuals who are involved with the criminal justice system (Bersani et al, 2014; Taft, 1933). A notable criticism of prior studies on immigration and crime is that they often rely on general population or community-based surveys, which may omit immigrant offenders from the sample and underestimate the level of crime among the foreign-born (Bersani et al,2014; Ramos & Wenger, 2020). The limited knowledge on criminal immigrants is problematic given that in 2018 44.8 million people, or 13.7% of the U.S. population, were born outside of the United States (Budiman et al, 2018).…”