Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities

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published online 17 June 2013American Sociological ReviewChristopher J. Lyons, María B. Vélez and Wayne A. Santoro

OpportunitiesNeighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political

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The Chicago school of sociology revolution-ized the understanding of how neighborhood conditions pattern the uneven spatial distribu-tion of social problems. Rather than viewing social problems as the product of the cluster-ing of certain kinds of people, urban sociolo-gists highlighted the costs of social and eco-nomic marginalization for neighborhoods’ social organization (Shaw and McKay 1942). According to prevailing perspectives, exten-sive poverty and other adverse conditions disrupt the ability of marginalized communi-ties to organize around common interests. A

focus on the dynamics of neighborhood social organization has proven helpful in explaining such diverse aggregate outcomes as rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, child mal-treatment, teenage childbearing, dropping out

491964 ASRXXX10.1177/0003122413491964American Sociological ReviewLyons et al.2013

aUniversity of New Mexico

Corresponding Authors:Christopher J. Lyons and María B. Vélez, Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico, MSC05 3080, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities

Christopher J. Lyons,a María B. Vélez,a and Wayne A. Santoroa

AbstractUsing a multilevel comparative framework, we propose that politically receptive city contexts facilitate the viability of marginalized neighborhoods. To illustrate this proposition, we examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence. Drawing on political process and minority incorporation theories, we argue that favorable immigrant political opportunities will strengthen the often-found inverse relationship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level. Unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (Peterson and Krivo 2010a) provide demographic and violence information for Census tracts in a representative sample of 87 large cities. We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities, such as the extent of minority political incorporation into elected offices and pro-immigrant legislation. Multilevel instrumental variable analyses reveal that the inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violent crime is generally enhanced in cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities. We speculate that this occurs because favorable political contexts bolster social organization by enhancing trust and public social control within immigrant neighborhoods. Our findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across ethnicity and nativity are shaped by the responsiveness of political actors and structures to their concerns.

Keywordsimmigration, violence, political opportunity structures, neighborhoods



2 American Sociological Review XX(X)

of high school, suicide, and violence (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997a, 1997b; Bur-sik and Grasmick 1993; Krivo and Peterson 1996; Park and Burgess 1924; Sampson 2010; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997; Shaw and McKay 1942). Yet because the vast majority of research on neighborhoods has been conducted within a given municipality, urban ecology scholarship has been left with an empirical and theoretical blind spot: neigh-borhoods are not islands unto themselves. Rather, they are nested within cities and city environments shape neighborhood outcomes. How larger structural forces at the city level worsen or ameliorate social problems within marginalized neighborhoods remains under-analyzed and under-theorized.

We move beyond neighborhood bounda-ries by investigating how city-level political environments influence the distribution of social problems across neighborhoods. Our central thesis is that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across class, race, ethnicity, and nativity partly depends on the receptivity of local political actors and structures to their needs. Politically receptive cities can engen-der trust in the political system and thus encourage residents of marginalized neighbor-hoods to become civically engaged, develop a sense of attachment to and ownership of their neighborhoods, and mobilize on behalf of neighborhood concerns (Williams 1998). Moreover, politically responsive cities can provide resources and opportunities across a myriad of domains—education, jobs, polic-ing, city services, neighborhood festivals, community outreach, political participation, and health—that shore up internal community processes and shape neighborhood viability.

To illustrate the role of city politics in shap-ing intra-neighborhood dynamics, we chose a politically divisive issue as our case study: the contemporary relationship between neighbor-hood immigrant concentration and violence. For more than a century, public opinion in the United States has expressed concern over immigration. Public opinion and political offi-cials’ discourse often equate immigrants with a plethora of social problems, especially in

regard to deviance and crime (Martinez 2006). Consistent reference to the criminal menace of the immigrant population implies that stricter policies limiting immigration or curbing immi-grant access to resources are part and parcel of crime control. Indeed, supporters of recent anti-immigrant policies, including Arizona’s SB 1070, Georgia’s HB 87, and Alabama’s HB 56, argue that such laws will make communi-ties safer (Morse 2011; Redmon 2011).

Decades of sociological research temper these xenophobic fears (Cohen 1931; Mar-tinez 2006; Sampson 2006; Taft 1933). In fact, social science research commonly finds an inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and local violence rates (Des-mond and Kubrin 2009; Feldmeyer 2009; Kubrin and Ishizawa 2012; Lee, Martinez, and Rosenfeld 2001; Martinez 2002; Mar-tinez, Lee, and Nielsen 2004; Reid et al. 2005). Scholars most often argue that rather than destabilize neighborhoods, immigrants invigorate local areas and fortify crime con-trol processes.

To investigate how city-level political environments shape the immigration-violence relationship, we reach beyond standard crimi-nological theories by drawing on social movement scholarship on political opportu-nity structures and political science research on minority incorporation (Browning, Mar-shall, and Tabb 1984; Meyer 2004). Combin-ing insights from these traditions, we propose the concept of “immigrant political opportu-nities,” which refers to the political receptiv-ity or vulnerability of cities to meeting the needs and demands of immigrant communi-ties. Cities have open, or favorable, immi-grant opportunities when supportive politicians are in office, the broader commu-nity is receptive to immigrant issues, cities adopt pro-immigrant legislation, minorities are bureaucratically incorporated into police departments, and the form of government grants immigrants and their allies institutional access to and influence in municipal decision-making. We argue that these city-level factors condition the link between immigrant con-centration and neighborhood violence: immi-gration will be especially helpful in reducing



Lyons et al. 3

neighborhood violence in cities that are sym-pathetic to the needs of immigrant communi-ties. We test this multilevel thesis and speculate that favorable immigrant political opportunities bolster social organization by setting in motion a “spiral of trust” (Gay 2002:718; see also Williams 1998) among immigrants and the broader community and enhancing public social control within immi-grant neighborhoods. In contrast, city regimes hostile to immigrant needs engender mistrust of civic institutions (Kirk et al. 2012), under-cutting the ability of neighborhoods with higher concentrations of immigrants to engage in crime control. City contexts with few immigrant political opportunities should weaken the protective association between immigrant concentration and violence at the neighborhood level.

Little research has linked city contextual factors within a multilevel framework to elu-cidate the neighborhood-level connection between immigrant concentration and vio-lence. We employ unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS) that provide, for the first time, large-scale multilevel demographic and violent crime data for 8,931 Census tracts nested within a representative sample of 87 large cities (Peterson and Krivo 2010a). We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities culled from secondary sources. These multilevel data allow us to assess variation in the association between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence across a large sample of cities and to test whether the often-found inverse relation-ship between immigration and violence is indeed enhanced in cities with open immi-grant political opportunities.

IMMIGRANT REVITALIZATION AND NEIGHBORHOOD VIOLENCE

Whereas studies in a few cities report null or positive relationships between immigrant concentration and violence, the lion’s share of

contemporary macro research finds immi-grant concentration is inversely associated with violence (Feldmeyer 2009; Kubrin and Ishizawa 2012; Lee et al. 2001; Martinez 2002, 2006; Martinez et al. 2004; Martinez, Rosenfeld, and Mares 2008; Martinez, Stowell, and Lee 2010; Ousey and Kubrin 2009; Reid et al. 2005; Wadsworth 2010).1 Neighborhoods with large shares of immi-grants often have lower levels of violence and drug-related crime than do similarly situated areas with fewer immigrants (Kubrin and Ishizawa 2012; Lee et al. 2001; Martinez et al. 2004; Martinez et al. 2008; Stowell and Martinez 2007). At the municipal level, cities that experienced growth in immigrant con-centration saw greater reductions in violence between 1990 and 2000, net of common con-trols (Stowell et al. 2009; Wadsworth 2010). Despite a number of classic challenges to causal inference relating to endogeneity and selection bias, these results are relatively robust across cross-sectional and longitudinal designs.2

The predominant explanation as to why immigrant concentration reduces neighbor-hood violence is known as the “immigrant revitalization perspective” (Feldmeyer 2009; Lee et al. 2001; Martinez 2002; Martinez et al. 2004; Reid et al. 2005).3 Immigrants’ capacity to revitalize communities stems from at least two factors. First, immigrants help fortify social organization. In particular, intact two-parent families and strong ties among families and neighbors characterize contemporary immigrant communities. Strong ties and fam-ily cohesion bolster processes of informal social control and may represent a key mecha-nism though which immigration benefits social organization (Ebaugh and Curry 2000; Feldmeyer 2009; Ousey and Kubrin 2009). Moreover, an influx of immigrants can expand and strengthen community institutions, includ-ing churches, schools, and immigrant-focused agencies (Chinchilla, Hamilton, and Loucky 1993; Ley 2008; Theodore and Martin 2007). Community institutions facilitate crime con-trol efforts and help defend community inter-ests because they organize activities that




create networks among residents, provide pro-gramming for community youth, connect communities to mainstream individuals and institutions, and help recruit external resources for the community (Ley 2008; Theodore and Martin 2007).

Second, because immigrants typically settle in poorer neighborhoods (Vélez 2009), an influx of recent immigrants in large numbers may invigorate local economies and redevelop urban cores. Specifically, immigration can alle-viate or reverse depopulation trends and the withdrawal of business capital (Reid et al. 2005). Research on ethnic enclaves echoes the claim that immigration can stimulate economic revitalization. Ethnic enclaves have extensive ethnic divisions of labor and immigrants with sufficient social capital to create jobs and higher wages (Portes and Zhou 1993). Although many residents in ethnic enclaves may be poor, the majority work and should have greater attach-ment to the labor market. High neighborhood employment levels signal integration into con-ventional life that may make crime less lucra-tive and viable (Martinez 2002).

IMMIGRANT POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIESSociologists have long emphasized the impor-tance of local political settings for the well-being of communities with concentrations of marginalized residents. Lieberson (1980), for example, contends that governments played a decisive role in aiding the assimilation of Southern, Central, and Eastern European immigrants across industrial centers in the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps most important, governments granted voting rights to immigrants and actively recruited them as voters. Likewise, Dahl (1961) sug-gests that Italian American success in secur-ing local political positions in New Haven, Connecticut assisted the employment of co-ethnics in civil service positions. Other research documents the experience of Black neighborhoods and reveals how hostile politi-cal climates can set marginalized neighbor-hoods on a path of disorder and decline. Local governments played vital roles in creating

segregated Black neighborhoods by, for instance, passing ordinances in the early 1900s making it illegal for Blacks to move into White neighborhoods and ignoring wide-spread racial discrimination in mortgage lending (Farley, Danziger, and Holzer 2002; Hirsch 1998; Massey and Denton 1993). Paralleling this attention to political context, immigration scholars note that policies of the receiving government influence immigrant incorporation patterns (Ellis and Almgren 2009; Portes and Zhou 1993; Winders 2012).

We extend this logic to argue that political contexts of reception shape the ability of neighborhoods with immigrant concentration to control crime. Specifically, we contend that processes of immigrant revitalization should be enhanced in cities with favorable political opportunities, such as Washington, DC, where policies limit local enforcement of immigra-tion laws and minorities have high levels of political representation. In contrast, immi-grant revitalization may be attenuated in cit-ies with unfavorable, or closed, political opportunities, such as Phoenix, where the local police department works closely with federal immigration officials embedded in the agency, and the mayor commissioned a new policy in 2008 mandating that police question all arrestees about citizenship status (Hoff-master et al. 2010; Newton and Kiefer 2008).

To elaborate on our multilevel thesis, we offer the concept of immigrant political oppor-tunities to capture the extent that a city is politically receptive or vulnerable to immi-grant demands and concerns. We develop immigrant political opportunities conceptually and operationally by referencing two litera-tures. First and most directly relevant is politi-cal process theory within the study of social movements. Political process theory argues that the broader political environment, termed the political opportunity structure, profoundly shapes social movement mobilization and policy outcomes (for a review, see Meyer 2004). Politically open contexts encourage constituencies to mobilize and facilitate gov-ernment response to their concerns.4 Scholars operationalize political opportunities in vari-ous ways, including receptivity of elected



Lyons et al. 5

officials to movement demands (Jenkins, Jacobs, and Agnone 2003; Meyer and Minkoff 2004), the extent that elites have made policy decisions favorable to constituency needs (Costain 1994; McAdam 1982), the presence of institutional aspects of the polity that grant challengers access and influence over policy decisions (Amenta and Poulsen 1996; Eisinger 1973), and amenability of the audience to movement issues (Gamson 1975; McCammon et al. 2001; Santoro 2008).

Second, we employ insights from the racial/ethnic politics literature focusing on the political and bureaucratic incorporation of minorities (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984, 1990; de la Garza 1988; Marrow 2009; Marschall and Ruhil 2007; Mindiola and Gut-ierrez 1988; Mladenka 1989; San Miguel 1984; Santoro 1995, 1999). The bulk of this work focuses on Black, and to a lesser degree Latino, incorporation and examines the bene-fits of in-group representation. Specifically, this research examines how minorities, through electoral and protest strategies, have secured elected positions, become a part of governing coalitions, or become incorporated into civil service jobs. This line of work high-lights substantive benefits of political incorpo-ration for minority residents, including passage of policies favorable to minorities, like civilian police review boards and affirma-tive action, as well as appointment of minori-ties to important public sector jobs (Browning et al. 1984, 1990; de la Garza 1988; Mindiola and Gutierrez 1988; Mladenka 1989; San Miguel 1984; Santoro 1995, 1999). Similarly, minority incorporation into civil service posi-tions, or bureaucratic incorporation, can lead to adoption of a wide range of policies and administrative procedures beneficial to minor-ity residents, including bilingual educational programs, access to health care, and public school curricula emphasizing Latino history (Jones-Correa 2008; Lewis and Ramakrishnan 2007; Marrow 2009; Theobald and Haider-Markel 2008). Minority political and bureau-cratic incorporation also can have symbolic value by enhancing minorities’ trust and per-ceptions of legitimacy in local political actors, law enforcement, and the government more

broadly (Gay 2002; Mansbridge 1999; Marschall and Ruhil 2007; Theobald and Haider-Markel 2008). Such social-psychological conse-quences can increase subsequent levels of minority participation in political affairs (Bobo and Gilliam 1990; Tate 1993).

From these literatures, we conceptualized five dimensions of immigrant political oppor-tunities at the city level. Our models test the extent to which each of these immigrant political opportunities conditions the associa-tion between immigration and violence at the neighborhood level.

Latino and Asian American political incorporation. Representation of Latinos and Asian Americans in municipal elected offices represents the political incorporation of immigrant constituents. Among the for-eign-born population in 2000, 78 percent were born in Latin American or Asian coun-tries (52 and 26 percent, respectively; Malone et al. 2003). Cities that incorporate these populations into municipal offices should be especially responsive to immigrant needs and demands. A wealth of data show that Latino politicians, for example, are more likely than their Anglo counterparts to advocate for leg-islation beneficial to constituency concerns (Mindiola and Gutierrez 1988; Mladenka 1989; San Miguel 1984; Santoro 1999). San-toro (1999), for instance, found that Latino politicians were vocal critics of English-only laws and helped defeat their passage.

Minority bureaucratic incorporation. Incorporation of minorities into mainstream public service and bureaucratic institutions reflects another immigrant political opportu-nity. Compared to elected political officials, civil servants may have more in common with the public, and therefore may be especially responsive to the public’s needs (Kranz 1976; Krislov 1974; Meier, Stewart, and England 1991; Theobald and Haider-Markel 2008). Particularly salient for our analysis of vio-lence, minority incorporation into police departments should institutionalize immigrant-friendly law-enforcement and administrative procedures, and, in turn, improve everyday




interactions with residents (Jones-Correa 2008; Lewis and Ramakrishnan 2007; Marrow 2009; Theobald and Haider-Markel 2008). Minority bureaucratic incorporation into the police force helps guard against hostility between the police and minority/immigrant residents.5

Pro-immigrant legislation. Immigrant-related policy climates vary considerably across cities. Some jurisdictions have sought to enhance the reach of immigration enforcement via 287(g) and “secure communities” legisla-tion and restrict immigrant access to public education, driver’s licenses, health care, and other amenities. Other governments have taken pro-immigrant stances by declaring them-selves “sanctuary cities” and limiting coopera-tion with immigration enforcement efforts (Lewis and Ramakrishnan 2007; National Immigration Law Center 2006). In the latter case, adoption of immigrant-friendly sanctuary policies represents a clear marker of cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities.

Audience receptivity to immigrant issues. The audience, defined as third parties within the relevant political system who are initially uninvolved in a conflict (Santoro 2008; Schattschneider 1960), crucially deter-mines movements’ ability to mobilize and secure policy concessions. A supportive audi-ence creates incentives for elites to respond favorably to challenger claims and encourages a challenging group to mobilize. A number of scholars have measured the presence of a sup-portive audience for liberal causes by using the electorate’s voting record for liberal politicians (Okamoto and Ebert 2010; Santoro 1999; San-toro and McGuire 1997). Liberal voting pat-terns suggest a local political ideology relatively amenable to immigrant mobilization and concerns. Okamoto and Ebert (2010), for example, found that immigrants were more likely to organize and protest in cities that cast a greater percentage of votes for the Demo-cratic presidential candidate in 2000.

Governmental structure. Social move-ment and political science research notes that governmental structure shapes challengers’

access and influence in policymaking deci-sions (Amenta and Poulsen 1996; Kitschelt 1986). At the municipal level, numerous schol-ars—including Eisinger (1973), who coined the term political opportunity structure—assert that compared to council-manager forms of government, a mayor-council government grants minorities greater access and influence in local politics. According to this argument, other municipal forms, particularly council-manager governments, tend to “mute the demands” of minorities (Karnig 1975:92) by stressing “professional rather than patronage style(s) of operation” (Slack and Sigelman 1987:674) and therefore are likely to oppose pro-immigrant policies that benefit immigrant constituencies.

IMMIGRANT POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, AND VIOLENCE

Why should favorable city-level immigrant opportunities strengthen the inverse relation-ship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level? Although we lack data to test the mechanisms attendant to our multi-level thesis, we discuss them because theo-retical propositions should make causal mechanisms clear. With social disorganiza-tion as a guiding framework, we argue that cities with open immigrant political opportu-nities should bolster social organization—the basis for effective crime control—within neighborhoods with concentrations of immi-grants. Social organization refers to local neighborhoods’ ability to solve commonly experienced problems and realize common goals, including safety from crime (Bursik 1988). Immigrant political opportunities should enhance neighborhood social organi-zation in two ways. First, cities with open immigrant political opportunities can gener-ate a “spiral of trust” that improves communi-cation between officials and immigrants, promotes legislation protecting immigrant interests, and generates greater system-level trust in government on the part of immigrant



Lyons et al. 7

groups (Williams 1998). By strengthening the trust that immigrants place in the civic pro-cess, receptive places defend against social isolation and cynicism of the legal and politi-cal system (Kirk et al. 2012). Research indi-cates that trust can encourage minorities’ participation in political affairs (Bobo and Gilliam 1990; Tate 1993) and forms a key foundation for collectively efficacious orga-nization against crime (Sampson et al. 1997). Immigrant trust in the political structure can facilitate involvement in social and political life, attachment to and ownership of their neighborhoods, and mobilization on behalf of neighborhood concerns.

Second, favorable political regimes may enhance the capacity of neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants to exert public social control. Public social control refers to residents’ ability to forge ties to local government and economic actors and thereby gain the resources needed to control crime (Bursik 1989; Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Squires and Kubrin 2006; Vélez 2001). Neighborhoods with strong ties to the police and local public offi-cials, for instance, tend to have high levels of informal social control (Silver and Miller 2004), low levels of household and personal victimization (Vélez 2001), and success in collective crime-control efforts (Carr 2005). In cities with open immigrant political oppor-tunities, public officials should be more will-ing to broker ties with communities containing immigrant concentrations and allocate them resources. Correspondingly, immigrant neigh-borhoods located in open regimes should be relatively trusting of local politicians and police, view them as more legitimate, and thus be more likely to work with them (Theobald and Haider-Markel 2008).

Case studies provide illustrations of how favorable regimes can enhance immigrants’ trust in public officials and fortify social organization via public social control. Lewis and Ramakrishnan (2007) report that a police department with significant minority police representation, notably a Black police chief, adopted sympathetic policies when interact-ing with an immigrant community, including

mandating cultural diversity training for officers, hiring bilingual officers, and imple-menting a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy for enforcing immigration law. The authors con-tend that the department’s immigrant-friendly policies sent a message to the immigrant community that law enforcement was respon-sive to their concerns and thus could be trusted. As such, the immigrant community was more likely to interact and engage in problem solving with local police officers.

In his study of an immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles, Sandoval (2009) claims it took the election of a Latino mayor and city council-members to convince neighborhood residents they could trust city officials and work with them on local crime-control efforts. For example, only after Latinos became part of the dominant governing coalition were residents willing and able to work with city officials to reduce crime that plagued a neigh-borhood park. Residents joined forces with the police to enact a community-policing program in which citizens regularly met with police and city bureaucrats to strategize about community crime-control efforts. This stimu-lated residents’ informal surveillance of the neighborhood park and mobilization of the law when residents spotted illegal behaviors. The result was the park’s transformation from “LA’s violent epicenter of drugs and crime” to a place relatively free of crime (Sandoval 2009:154).6

DATA AND METHODSWe used unique data from the NNCS (Peterson and Krivo 2010a), the first large-scale dataset that includes crime and sociodemographic information for tracts nested within a repre-sentative sample of U.S. cities. The full NNCS dataset includes 91 cities (with populations of more than 100,000 in the year 2000) and 9,593 Census tracts. Missing data on key vari-ables (including spatial lags of violent crime) reduced our analytic sample to 8,931 tracts nested in 87 cities.7 The large sample of cities generalizes to most large urban places in terms of crime rates, racial/ethnic composition and segregation, and economic disadvantage




(Krivo, Peterson, and Kuhl 2009; Peterson and Krivo 2010b). These data also include cit-ies with varied histories of immigrant settle-ment, including traditional gateway and non-gateway cities (Singer 2004). We supple-mented these data with measures of immigrant political opportunities at the city level col-lected from a variety of secondary sources.

Dependent variables. We examined two forms of violent crime: the number of homi-cides and the number of robberies reported to police departments between 1999 and 2001 at the tract level.8 We used multiyear counts to minimize the impact of annual fluctuations, especially for smaller units (Peterson and Krivo 2010a). Homicide is the most serious and reliably reported violent crime and also the focus of much previous immigration-crime research (Graif and Sampson 2009; Martinez 2002; Martinez et al. 2010; Reid et al. 2005; Wadsworth 2010).9 Although less reliably reported to police, robbery is more common. Ideally, we would also include other types of violence (e.g., assault and rape), but missing data for these crimes in the NNCS warrant limiting our focus to homicide and robbery to maximize the number of cities in our analysis. We present separate models for homicide and robbery in light of the possibil-ity that the nature of the immigration-crime relationship may vary by type of violence (Hagan and Palloni 1999; Stowell 2007; Stowell et al. 2009).

Tract-level covariates. The majority of our tract-level predictors came from the 2000 Census. Our main focus at the tract level is the relationship between immigrant concen-tration and violence. Previous research mea-sures immigrant concentration in varied ways, typically with some combination of Census indicators of the total foreign-born popula-tion, recent foreign born, linguistic isolation, and percentage Latino (Desmond and Kubrin 2009; Graif and Sampson 2009; Kubrin and Ishizawa 2012; Martinez et al. 2010; Ousey and Kubrin 2009; Peterson and Krivo 2010b; Reid et al. 2005; Wadsworth 2010). Follow-ing previous research, we gauged immigrant

concentration by indexing two measures (average z-scores; α = .92): recent foreign born, which represents the percentage of the population that is foreign born and arrived in the United States since 1990, and linguistic isolation, or the percentage of households where no one age 14 years or older speaks English well. In sensitivity analyses, we explored a variety of single-item measures of immigration (percentage foreign born, recent foreign born, and linguistic isolation) and another multi-item index of immigrant con-centration (percentage Latino, recent foreign born, and linguistic isolation). These alterna-tive measures produced very similar patterns of violent crime to those discussed here using our two-component index of immigrant con-centration.

We included a number of well-established predictors of neighborhood violence. Concen-trated disadvantage is an index (average z-scores) of six items: the poverty rate, extent of joblessness (percentage of persons age 16 to 64 years who were unemployed or out of the labor force), low-wage jobs (percentage of workers in the six occupations with the lowest average incomes), professional jobs (percent-age of employed civilian population age 16 years and older in management, professional, and related occupations [reverse coded]), high school graduates (percentage of adults age 25 years and older with at least a high school degree), and percentage of households that were single-mother families (α = .91). We measured racial/ethnic composition of neigh-borhoods with a set of dummy variables that contrast predominately White (reference group) tracts with Black, Latino, minority (Black and Latino), or integrated tracts. Fol-lowing Krivo and colleagues (2009), we clas-sified predominately White, Black, or Latino tracts as those where the respective group comprised 70 percent or more of the tract population in 2000. Minority tracts represent areas where Blacks and Latinos combined for 70 percent or more of the population, but nei-ther group alone was more than 70 percent. All other tracts indicate integrated areas, or tracts with relatively more balanced population com-positions. We measured residential instability



Lyons et al. 9

with an index (average z-scores) of the per-centage of renter-occupied units and the per-centage of residents age 5 years and older who lived in a different dwelling in 1995 (α = .69). We accounted for the percentage of the popula-tion that was male and between 15 and 34 years of age to control for the crime-prone population. We also measured population tract size to address issues of over-dispersion in our Poisson models.

Finally, we constructed spatial lags for each of our dependent variables to control for spatial autocorrelation in violence. The spa-tial lags represent the average of each violent crime count (homicide or robbery) for Census tracts that are geographically adjacent to the immediate tract. We computed spatial lags by multiplying tract characteristic values by a row standardized first-order spatial contiguity matrix that utilized a queen criterion (see Peterson and Krivo 2009, 2010b). The diago-nal of the matrix is filled with zeros, indicat-ing that a tract is not a neighbor of itself.

City-level covariates. We used five mea-sures of immigrant political opportunities, each corresponding to one of our five dimen-sions of the concept.10 To capture minority political incorporation, we tallied the total number of Latino and Asian elected munici-pal officials, such as the mayor and members of the city council. These data came from the National Directory of Latino Elected Officials (2000) and the National Asian and Pacific American Political Almanac (2000–01). Because the number of Latino and Asian municipal elected officials in a city is at least partly a function of each group’s population size, we divided the number by the population of Latinos and Asians in the city. Given the resulting small number, we multiplied by 100,000 to represent the rate of elected offi-cials per 100,000 Latinos and Asians. We measured the extent of minority bureaucratic incorporation into the police force by con-structing a ratio of the percentage of the police force (sworn officers) that was His-panic, Black, or Asian and the percentage of the city population that was Hispanic, Black,

or Asian. Values below one indicate under-representation in the police force relative to the minority population in the city, whereas values over one represent over-representa-tion. We include Black police officers in our measure because political science research on this topic suggests that representation of Black officers and chiefs sets the stage for tolerance toward other racial/ethnic minori-ties (Browning et al. 1984, 1990; Lewis and Ramakrishnan 2007; Saltzstein 1989).11 Data for minority bureaucratic incorporation into the police force came from the Law Enforce-ment Management and Administrative Statis-tics (2000).

Drawing from the National Immigration Law Center (NILC 2006), the Congressional Research Service (Seghetti, Vina, and Ester 2004), and related research (Carro 1989), we determined favorable immigrant legislation based on whether a municipality was a sanctu-ary city due to at least one law or formal reso-lution limiting local enforcement of immigration laws as of 2001. As one example, in 2000 the San Diego Police Department instituted Procedure 6.18, which states, “offic-ers shall not make an effort to look for viola-tions of immigration law” (NILC 2006:3). The procedure also prohibits officers from releas-ing undocumented persons to the U.S. Immi-gration and Naturalization Service (INS) or Border Patrol agents when they are victims or witnesses of crime, involved in traffic viola-tions, or seeking medical treatment. According to a Congressional Research Service report on sanctuary policies, there are “conflicting views as to what constitutes a sanctuary policy” (Kim and Garcia 2008:4). We relied on listings provided by the NILC (2006), Seghetti and colleagues (2004), and Carro (1989) to identify cities with at least one formal sanctuary-level law or resolution as of 2001. Our resulting measure may miss more informal or de facto practices. Our focus on formal policies, how-ever, is consistent with our theoretical frame-work because formal policies arguably represent the visible face of government.

We measured audience receptivity to immi-grant issues with electorate voting records.




Specifically, we calculated the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic presidential can-didate (Gore) in 2000 to gauge the extent that the broader audience was likely supportive of pro-immigrant and other liberal causes. Data for this measure came from the 2000 County and City Data Book published by the U.S. Census Bureau (2001).12 Finally, to measure governmental structure, we compared cities with a mayor-council form of government (coded as one) versus a council-manager form of government (coded zero) using data from the Municipal Yearbook (2000).13

Using 2000 Census data for cities, we con-trolled for several other city-level characteristics associated with different levels of neighborhood violence: the city-level disadvantage index, measured in a parallel fashion to the neighbor-hood indicator; residential mobility (percentage of the population age 5 years and older who lived in a different residence in 1995); percent-age non-Latino Black; percentage Latino; per-centage of the total city population that was foreign born; and percentage of young males age 15 to 34 years. We also included dichoto-mous variables for South and West regions, with cities in other regions as the referent. We con-trolled for non-Latino White and non-Latino Black segregation with an index of dissimilarity across Census tracts within a city (Krivo et al. 2009). Table 1 lists means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values for all city- and tract-level variables.

ANALYTIC STRATEGYGiven the multilevel structure of our data, we estimated a series of hierarchical generalized linear models (HGLM) that correctly account for the non-independence of observations, with 8,931 tracts (level-one units) nested within 87 cities (level-two units). We grand-mean centered all continuous variables. Because we analyze relatively rare events within small units, we fitted Poisson models with homicide or robbery counts as the out-come. Given Poisson model assumptions, we tested whether the mean and variance of the dependent variables were equal and found

that the variance for both homicide and rob-bery were considerably larger than their means, indicating significant over-dispersion. Hence, we accounted for over-dispersion in the level-one variance. In the HGLM frame-work, a Poisson model with over-dispersion is analogous to a negative binomial model (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002; Snijders and Bosker 1999). We specified that these counts had variable exposure by tract population and thereby transformed the outcome to violent crimes per capita rates (Osgood 2000).

We explored whether the neighborhood association between immigrant concentration and violence varied substantially across cities by allowing for random variation in the slope of immigrant concentration. We then attempted to account for any random variation in the estimate of immigrant concentration on vio-lent crime with cross-level interactions that assessed the moderating potential of city-level immigrant political opportunities. Following prior work by Peterson and Krivo (Krivo et al. 2009; Peterson and Krivo 2010b), we also let the slope of concentrated disadvantage vary randomly in all models.

Although NNCS data provide unique advan-tages for studying how city-level opportunities influence local neighborhood processes, the cross-sectional nature of these data poses some challenges to causal inference. Specifically, we acknowledge classic concerns about endogene-ity and selectivity when determining the causal effect of immigrant concentration on tract-level violence. For example, selection of immigrants into less violent-prone areas may account for the inverse association between immigration and violence. Furthermore, immigrants’ charac-teristics, such as criminal propensity, may guide selection into tracts. If this is the case, observed cross-sectional relationships between immigra-tion and violence would be misleading.

We attempted to address endogeneity and selectivity concerns in a number of ways. First, we controlled for prior (i.e., 1990) foreign-born population in sensitivity models to account for the fact that immigrants move into places that already have high immigrant concentration and possibly lower violence



Lyons et al. 11

Table 1. Means and Standard Deviations of Dependent and Independent Variables

Mean SD Min. Max.

Tract Level (N = 8,931) Homicide (1999 to 2001) 1.53 2.53 .00 33.00 Robbery (1999 to 2001) 44.79 49.46 .00 997.00 Immigrant concentration .04 1.97 –1.60 11.88 Immigrant concentration 1990 .02 1.95 –1.36 10.38 Population 3930.39 2112.07 301.00 23960.00 Disadvantage –.01 .87 –1.67 3.71 Residential instability .03 .87 –2.13 2.74 Latino tract .08 .27 .00 1.00 Black tract .16 .37 .00 1.00 Minority tract .07 .26 .00 1.00 Integrated tract .34 .47 .00 1.00 Percent young males (15 to 34 years) 15.87 5.75 .00 55.92 Percent foreign born 1990 12.23 15.15 .00 86.90 Spatial lag of homicide 1.60 1.78 .00 18.00 Spatial lag of robbery 47.20 37.04 .00 346.40

City Level (N = 87) Disadvantage .01 .88 –2.02 2.43 Residential mobility 52.74 5.89 31.93 66.52 Percent Black 18.83 16.58 .53 81.02 Percent Latino 19.04 18.56 1.09 90.46 Percent foreign born 15.52 12.36 1.58 72.11 Percent young males (15 to 34 years) 16.00 2.42 11.24 24.09 South .36 .48 .00 1.00 West .28 .45 .00 1.00 White/Black segregation 47.55 18.22 14.28 85.19 Latino/Asian elected officials

(per 100,000).08 .25 .00 2.32

Police minority incorporation .52 .22 .08 1.13 Sanctuary city .14 .35 .00 1.00 Percent votes for Gore 52.00 .10 .27 .85 Mayor-council government .44 .50 .00 1.00

rates. Second, we utilized a multilevel instru-mental variable approach that attempts to purge our measure of immigrant concentra-tion of endogeneity with violence (see Ebbes, Bockenholt, and Wedel 2004; Wooldridge 2002). This required finding a theoretically justified instrument that is strongly correlated with immigrant concentration yet not corre-lated with the residuals from our immigra-tion-violent crime models. We followed previous work (MacDonald, Hipp, and Gill forthcoming; see also Card 2001) and used prior levels of immigrant concentration in 1990, specifically an index of the percent of

foreign born and percent of linguistically iso-lated persons, as an instrumental variable for immigrant concentration in 2000. Research clearly indicates that immigrants settle into areas with other immigrants (Alba and Nee 2005; Card 2001), so we have ample reason to suspect that previous immigrant concentra-tion in 1990 will correlate strongly with immigrant concentration in 2000. Indeed, across 8,931 Census tracts the bivariate cor-relation between the 1990 and 2000 measures is strong and positive (.853). Furthermore, as Table A1 in the Appendix shows, immigrant concentration in 1990 significantly predicts




immigrant concentration in 2000, net of the covariates used in our violence models. In contrast, immigrant concentration in 1990 does not correlate with the residuals of our base models in Table 2 for homicide or rob-bery. It is important to note that we cannot directly test the requirement of exogeneity (i.e., no correlation between the disturbance term and our instrumental variable) because it is an unobservable concept (Wooldridge 2002). However, given that prior immigration was measured a decade prior to our measures of violence, it is a predetermined variable that is exogenous by construction. As such, we can think of no reason to suspect prior levels of immigrant concentration would violate the assumption of exogeneity (MacDonald et al. forthcoming).

Selection concerns may arise at the city level as well. If we find that city context mod-erates the neighborhood relationship between immigration and violence, we must contend with the alternative explanation that immigrant political opportunities guide the selection of immigrants into cities. Our large sample of 87 cities captures varied immigrant realities in terms of immigrant supply and demand and likely mitigates some of the concern about endogeneity and selection at the city level. In all models, we controlled for region to account for the fact that immigrants from various send-ing countries have unique geographic settle-ment patterns. We also controlled for overall levels of foreign born because immigrants may select into cities with established co-ethnics. Furthermore, as reported in Table A2 in the Appendix, we found few systematic sociode-mographic differences in characteristics of politically open versus closed cities. As one example, sanctuary cities are no more likely to have higher concentrations of foreign-born populations than are cities without sanctuary policies. The lack of systematic differences in structural characteristics across cities by immi-grant opportunities decreases the concern that opportunity structures guide the selection of certain kinds of immigrants.

We first show baseline models for homi-cide and robbery (Table 2). The first model

tests their relationship with immigrant con-centration, net of controls, with slopes allowed to vary randomly for tract-level immigrant concentration and disadvantage. Subsequent models allow for the possibility that tract immigrant concentration is an endogenous predictor and account for endo-geneity via a two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) process (Terza, Basu, and Rathouz 2008), in which residuals from a first-stage equation are included with the endogenous predictor in second-stage models. For nonlin-ear models like ours, Terza and colleagues (2008) demonstrate the superior consistency of 2SRI compared to traditional two-stage predictor substitution (2SPS), where pre-dicted values from the first-stage equation replace the endogenous variable in second-stage models. In the first-stage multilevel models (Table A1 in the Appendix), immi-grant concentration in 1990 predicts immi-grant concentration in 2000 along with other tract- and city-level covariates. In the second stage, we followed Terza and colleagues (2008) and included level-one residuals from the first stage along with the measure of immigrant concentration in 2000. Including residuals in these models adjusts the coeffi-cient of immigrant concentration (purging endogeneity) and provides a Hausman-style test of the significance of endogeneity.

RESULTSTable 2 presents base-line models of the asso-ciation between immigrant concentration and homicide and robbery counts. For both out-comes, Model 1 reveals that neighborhoods with greater immigrant concentration had fewer homicides and robberies. This represents the average effect of immigration on homicide and robbery for 8,931 tracts across 87 large cities and is consistent with expectations of the immigrant revitalization hypothesis. Both models also show that the slope for immigrant concentration varies substantially across cities, as evidenced by the significant immigrant con-centration variance components (bottom panel of Table 2). The average association across our



13

Tabl

e 2.

Mu

ltil

evel

Poi

sson

Mod

els

(wit

h V

aria

ble

Exp

osu

re)

of N

eigh

borh

ood

Hom

icid

e an

d R

obbe

ry, N

atio

nal

Nei

ghbo

rhoo

d C

rim

e S

tud

y 20

00

Hom

icid

eR

obbe

ry

M

odel

1M

odel

2M

odel

12S

RI

Mod

el 1

2SR

I M

odel

2

b

SE

bS

Eb

SE

bS

Eb

SE

Trac

t L

evel

(N

= 8

,931

)

Dis

adva

nta

ge.7

07***

.033

.705

***

.030

.650

***

.044

.571

***

.035

.632

***

.044

R

esid

enti

al i

nst

abil

ity

.109

***

.022

.108

***

.015

.272

***

.014

.256

***

.019

.266

***

.014

P

erce

nt

you

ng

mal

es.0

05.0

04.0

05.0

03.0

02.0

03.0

04.0

04.0

01.0

03

Lat

ino

trac

ta.6

83***

.129

.676

***

.062

.099

.086

.131

.123

.036

.088

B

lack

tra

cta

.863

***

.097

.866

***

.051

.211

**.0

60.3

22***

.069

.251

***

.060

M

inor

ity

trac

ta.8

26***

.101

.825

***

.051

.155

**.0

63.2

54**

.078

.140

**.0

63

Inte

grat

ed t

ract

a.5

57***

.062

.556

***

.040

.204

**.0

58.2

66***

.064

.186

**.0

60

Sp

atia

l la

g.0

77***

.015

.077

***

.004

.006

***

.001

.006

***

.001

.006

***

.001

Im

mig

ran

t co

nce

ntr

atio

n–.

066***

.016

–.06

4***

.019

–.05

7**

.019

–.06

1**

.022

–.02

5.0

21

Sta

ge-o

ne

resi

du

als

–.00

4.0

17–.

036

.026

–.04

2**

.012

Cit

y L

evel

(N

= 8

7 )

D

isad

van

tage

–.05

7.0

93–.

057

.090

–.06

4.0

79–.

048

.072

–.06

0.0

79

Res

iden

tial

mob

ilit

y.0

08.0

10.0

08.0

12–.

003

.012

.004

.010

–.00

3.0

12

Per

cen

t B

lack

.012

**.0

04.0

12**

.004

.015

***

.004

.009

**.0

03.0

15***

.004

P

erce

nt

Lat

ino

.007

.005

.007

.005

.004

.005

.002

.004

.005

.005

P

erce

nt

fore

ign

bor

n–.

015†

.008

–.01

6**

.006

–.00

2.0

06–.

004

.005

–.00

4.0

06

Per

cen

t yo

un

g m

ales

.015

.021

.015

.023

.011

.019

–.02

0.0

18.0

11.0

20

Sou

thb

–.04

0.0

91–.

040

.109

–.13

3.0

91–.

121

.080

–.13

1.0

91

Wes

tb.2

53**

.109

.254

**.1

19.1

36.1

03.0

84.0

99.1

51.1

03

Wh

ite/

Bla

ck s

egre

gati

on.0

16***

.003

.016

***

.003

.016

***

.003

.014

***

.002

.016

***

.003

Inte

rcep

t–8

.96***

.03

–8.9

86***

.083

–4.9

98***

.071

–5.0

31***

.072

–4.9

91***

.072

Var

ian

ce C

omp

onen

ts (

SD

)

Inte

rcep

t.2

97***

.297

***

.364

***

.307

***

.367

***

Trac

t d

isad

van

tage

.143

***

.143

***

.391

***

.304

***

.393

***

Imm

igra

nt

con

cen

trat

ion

.075

***

.076

***

.156

***

.158

***

Not

e: S

E r

efer

s to

rob

ust

sta

nd

ard

err

ors;

tra

ct p

opu

lati

on 2

000

as v

aria

ble

exp

osu

re.

a Ref

eren

t =

Wh

ite

trac

t.b R

efer

ent

= o

ther

reg

ion

.†p

< .1

0; *

p <

.05;

** p

< .0

1; ***

p <

.001

(tw

o-ta

iled

tes

ts);

2S

RI

refe

rs t

o tw

o-st

age

resi

du

al i

ncl

usi

on m

odel

s.




sample is clearly negative. Yet, the random slope for immigrant concentration indicates that for tracts in some cities, immigrant con-centration was inversely associated with vio-lence, whereas for tracts in other cities, immigrant concentration had the opposite (positive) association. The estimated associa-tion between immigration and homicide ranged from negative (–.216) to positive (.084) for 95 percent of cities in our sample; for robbery, the variation was greater (from –.369 to .255).14 In additional analyses not shown, we introduced the percentage of the population that was for-eign born in 1990 as a crude control for selec-tion of immigrants into tracts. Controlling for foreign born in the previous decade does little to change the estimate of immigrant concentra-tion on homicide or robbery.

We now address the likelihood that immi-grant concentration is an endogenous regres-sor. As explained earlier, the 2SRI models include residuals from the first-stage equation (Table A1 in the Appendix) along with immi-grant concentration. The 2SRI model for homicide allows the slopes for immigrant concentration and disadvantage to vary ran-domly across cities. Results mimic those pre-sented in Model 1: immigrant concentration was inversely associated with homicide on average, and the slope for immigration varied substantially across cities. Although we cau-tion that our instrumental variable approach cannot provide incontrovertible evidence that immigration causes less homicide on aver-age, consistency across our models, as well as previous research, buttress this claim.

For robbery, the first 2SRI model restricts between-city variation in the slope of immi-grant concentration to zero. The coefficient for immigrant concentration in this model is negative and significant. The second 2SRI model for robbery specifies the slope for immigrant concentration to vary randomly across cities. As indicated in the lower panel, the chi-square test of the variance component for immigration is statistically significant and relatively large. In contrast to homicide, after accounting for this substantial variation across cities in the relationship between immigration and robbery, the average point

estimate for immigration is negative but no longer significant at traditional levels.

Next, we examined the extent to which city-level immigrant political opportunities moderate the immigrant concentration- violence relationship. Empirically, we did so by testing for cross-level interactions between tract-level immigrant concentration and each of the five measures of city-level immigrant political opportunities. Table 3 presents results for homicide; Table 4 presents results for robbery.15 In terms of homicide, we found evidence of significant moderating effects in the manner we predicted for all but one of our five indicators of political opportunity. Politi-cal incorporation of Asians and Latinos into elected municipal offices (Model 1) and bureaucratic incorporation of minorities into police departments (Model 2) both moderate the immigration-homicide relationship. In particular, the negative association between tract-level immigrant concentration and neighborhood homicide was strengthened in cities with minority incorporation into both elected offices and the police force. In Model 3, the negative interaction between sanctuary cities and tract immigration suggests that the protective association between immigration and homicide is greater in cities with pro-immigrant legislation. This implies that tracts benefit most from immigrant concentration in terms of homicide reduction in cities that limit local enforcement of federal immigra-tion laws. Model 4 reports a negative and significant interaction between the percentage of votes cast in the 2000 general election for Gore and tract-level instrumented immigrant concentration, suggesting that Democratic support enhances the inverse relationship between immigration and homicide. The lone nonsignificant interaction with city-level immigrant political opportunities is found in Model 5: mayor-council governments do not significantly moderate the effect of immi-grant concentration on homicide compared to council-manager governments.

For illustration, Figure 1 graphs the condi-tional relationship between immigrant concen-tration, political incorporation of Asians and Latinos, and homicide. High or low values



15

Tabl

e 3.

Mu

ltil

evel

Poi

sson

2S

RI

Mod

els

(wit

h V

aria

ble

Exp

osu

re)

of N

eigh

borh

ood

Hom

icid

e w

ith

Cro

ss-L

evel

In

tera

ctio

ns,

NN

CS

200

0

Mod

el 1

Mod

el 2

Mod

el 3

Mod

el 4

Mod

el 5

b

SE

bS

Eb

SE

bS

Eb

SE

Trac

t L

evel

(N

= 8

,931

)

Dis

adva

nta

ge.7

09***

.037

.707

***

.036

.707

***

.038

.710

***

.037

.705

***

.038

R

esid

enti

al i

nst

abil

ity

.109

***

.022

.108

***

.021

.108

***

.022

.109

***

.021

.109

***

.022

P

erce

nt

you

ng

mal

es.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04.0

04

Lat

ino

trac

ta.6

78***

.139

.650

***

.141

.670

***

.152

.669

***

.145

.676

***

.141

B

lack

tra

cta

.865

***

.102

.859

***

.096

.866

***

.103

.857

***

.102

.866

***

.102

M

inor

ity

trac

ta.8

27***

.104

.816

***

.100

.819

***

.108

.812

***

.108

.824

***

.104

In

tegr

ated

tra

cta

.554

***

.065

.540

***

.062

.554

***

.066

.551

***

.065

.556

***

.065

S

pat

ial

lag

hom

icid

e.0

77***

.015

.077

***

.014

.077

***

.015

.077

***

.015

.077

***

.015

Im

mig

ran

t co

nce

ntr

atio

n–.

073**

.027

–.06

1**

.024

–.05

1.0

32–.

061**

.026

–.05

9.0

32

x L

atin

o/A

sian

ele

cted

off

icia

ls–.

154**

.046

x P

olic

e m

inor

ity

inco

rpor

atio

n–.

233***

.048

x S

anct

uar

y ci

ty–.

057**

.025

x P

erce

nt

vote

s D

emoc

rat

–.30

4***

.076

x M

ayor

-cou

nci

l–.

009

.027

S

tage

-on

e re

sid

ual

s–.

004

.029

–.01

6.0

30–.

006

.032

–.00

3.0

29–.

004

.030

Cit

y L

evel

(N

= 8

7)

Dis

adva

nta

ge–.

043

.091

–.06

2.0

92–.

063

.094

–.07

4.0

89–.

045

.093

R

esid

enti

al m

obil

ity

.010

.010

.007

.011

.007

.010

.006

.010

.011

.010

P

erce

nt

Bla

ck.0

13**

.004

.015

**.0

04.0

13**

.004

.014

**.0

04.0

12**

.004

P

erce

nt

Lat

ino

.008

.005

.010

†.0

05.0

07.0

05.0

07.0

05.0

06.0

05

Per

cen

t fo

reig

n b

orn

–.01

6†.0

08–.

017**

.007

–.01

7†.0

09–.

015†

.008

–.01

5†.0

09

Per

cen

t yo

un

g m

ales

.015

.022

.026

.023

.017

.021

.016

.020

.011

.022

S

outh

b–.

044

.086

.034

.096

–.03

8.0

92–.

064

.092

–.02

5.0

93

Wes

tb.2

41**

.102

.265

**.1

16.2

66**

.114

.275

**.1

11.2

62**

.107

W

hit

e/B

lack

seg

rega

tion

.016

***

.003

.015

***

.003

.017

***

.003

.017

***

.003

.015

***

.003

L

atin

o/A

sian

ele

cted

off

icia

ls–.

127

.115

Pol

ice

min

orit

y in

corp

orat

ion

.007

.198

San

ctu

ary

city

–.05

1.1

00

P

erce

nt

vote

s D

emoc

rat

–.47

1.3

25

M

ayor

-cou

nci

l.0

75.0

86In

terc

ept

–8.9

84***

.086

–9.0

04***

.099

–8.9

82***

.093

–8.9

80***

.091

–9.0

28***

.101

Not

e: S

E r

efer

s to

rob

ust

sta

nd

ard

err

ors;

tra

ct p

opu

lati

on 2

000

as v

aria

ble

exp

osu

re.

a Ref

eren

t =

Wh

ite

trac

t.b R

efer

ent

= o

ther

reg

ion

.Tr

act

dis

adva

nta

ge a

nd

im

mig

ran

t co

nce

ntr

atio

n s

pec

ified

wit

h r

and

om s

lop

es: †

p <

.10;

*p

< .0

5; ** p

< .0

1; ***

p <

.001

(tw

o-ta

iled

tes

ts).



16

Tabl

e 4.

Mu

ltil

evel

Poi

sson

2S

RI

Mod

els

(wit

h V

aria

ble

Exp

osu

re)

of N

eigh

borh

ood

Rob

bery

wit

h C

ross

-Lev

el I

nte

ract

ion

s, N

NC

S 2

000

Mod

el 1

Mod

el 2

Mod

el 3

Mod

el 4

Mod

el 5

b

SE

bS

Eb

SE

bS

Eb

SE

Trac

t L

evel

(N

= 8

,931

)

Dis

adva

nta

ge.6

33***

.044

.632

***

.043

.638

***

.045

.637

***

.045

.632

***

.044

R

esid

enti

al i

nst

abil

ity

.266

***

.014

.266

***

.014

.267

***

.014

.268

***

.013

.266

***

.014

P

erce

nt

you

ng

mal

es.0

01.0

03.0

01.0

03.0

01.0

03.0

01.0

03.0

01.0

03

Lat

ino

trac

ta.2

50***

.060

.249

***

.060

.234

***

.057

.231

***

.055

.247

***

.058

B

lack

tra

cta

.139

**.0

63.1

39**

.063

.131

.069

.115

.072

.138

**.0

65

Min

orit

y tr

acta

.185

**.0

60.1

86**

.060

.195

**.0

58.1

86**

.060

.189

**.0

59

Inte

grat

ed t

ract

a.0

06***

.001

.006

***

.001

.006

***

.001

.006

***

.001

.006

***

.001

S

pat

ial

lag

robb

ery

.035

.087

.035

.088

.018

.105

.031

.097

.035

.090

Im

mig

ran

t co

nce

ntr

atio

n–.

024

.021

–.02

5.0

21–.

009

.023

–.03

4.0

23–.

010

.028

x

Lat

ino/

Asi

an e

lect

ed o

ffic

ials

–.00

7.2

66

x

Pol

ice

min

orit

y in

corp

orat

ion

–.01

9.0

87

x

San

ctu

ary

city

–.13

1**

.036

x P

erce

nt

vote

s D

emoc

rat

–.29

2**

.093

x M

ayor

-cou

nci

l–.

036

.027

S

tage

-on

e re

sid

ual

s–.

042**

.012

–.04

3**

.012

–.04

6**

.016

–.03

2**

.013

–.04

1**

.012

Cit

y L

evel

(N

= 8

7)

Dis

adva

nta

ge–.

063

.080

–.04

1.0

79–.

083

.077

–.05

3.0

78–.

054

.077

R

esid

enti

al m

obil

ity

–.00

4.0

12–.

002

.013

–.00

5.0

11–.

001

.011

.000

.011

P

erce

nt

Bla

ck.0

15***

.004

.014

**.0

04.0

15***

.004

.014

**.0

04.0

15**

.004

P

erce

nt

Lat

ino

.004

.005

.003

.005

.006

.005

.005

.005

.004

.005

P

erce

nt

fore

ign

bor

n–.

004

.006

–.00

3.0

06–.

005

.006

–.00

4.0

06–.

003

.006

P

erce

nt

you

ng

mal

es.0

10.0

20.0

12.0

21.0

15.0

20.0

10.0

19.0

08.0

20

Sou

thb

–.11

1.0

98–.

120

.094

–.13

2.0

91–.

130

.096

–.11

1.0

91

Wes

tb.1

78.1

10.1

57.1

06.1

57.1

03.1

38.1

03.1

71†

.102

W

hit

e/B

lack

seg

rega

tion

.017

***

.003

.016

***

.003

.017

***

.003

.016

***

.003

.015

***

.003

L

atin

o/A

sian

ele

cted

off

icia

ls.0

84.0

67

P

olic

e m

inor

ity

inco

rpor

atio

n.2

02.1

43

S

anct

uar

y ci

ty–.

066

.106

Per

cen

t vo

tes

Dem

ocra

t.1

53.3

07

M

ayor

-cou

nci

l.0

92.0

73In

terc

ept

–5.0

05***

.076

–4.9

99***

.073

–4.9

86***

.071

–4.9

90***

.072

–5.0

47***

.083

Not

e: S

E r

efer

s to

rob

ust

sta

nd

ard

err

ors;

tra

ct p

opu

lati

on 2

000

as v

aria

ble

exp

osu

re.

a Ref

eren

t =

Wh

ite

trac

t.b R

efer

ent

= o

ther

reg

ion

.Tr

act

dis

adva

nta

ge a

nd

im

mig

ran

t co

nce

ntr

atio

n s

pec

ified

wit

h r

and

om s

lop

es: †

p <

.10;

*p

< .0

5; ** p

< .0

1; ***

p <

.001

(tw

o-ta

iled

tes

ts).



Lyons et al. 17

refer to 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean (see Table 1). Figure 1 shows that neighborhood homicide decreases as immi-grant concentration increases and that this inverse relationship is most notable in cities with greater political incorporation of Asians and Latinos into municipal offices.

How do these patterns for homicide com-pare to those for robbery? Table 4 presents whether each of the five city-level political contexts moderates the relationship between tract-level instrumented immigrant concen-tration and robbery counts. The overall pat-tern of results for robbery is similar to that for homicide in terms of direction of product terms, although only two of the four signifi-cant interactions for homicide reach statistical significance for robbery. For robbery, neigh-borhoods benefit most from immigrant con-centration in cities that have sanctuary laws/resolutions (Model 3) and that have a more receptive audience in the form of support for Gore (Model 4).

To illustrate one of these relationships, Figure 2 graphs the conditional association between immigrant concentration, sanctuary

city policy, and robbery. High or low values for immigrant concentration refer to 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean. Figure 2 shows that neighborhood robbery decreases as immigrant concentration increases and that this relationship is most precipitous in cities with formal policies that limit the enforcement of immigration laws (14 percent of our sample).

In contrast with homicide, neither political incorporation of Asians and Latinos into elected offices (Model 1) nor bureaucratic incorporation into the police force (Model 2) moderate the relationship between neighbor-hood immigration and robbery. The product terms are negative but not significant at tradi-tional levels. As with the homicide models, mayor-council form of government does not interact significantly with immigrant concen-tration to influence robbery counts (Model 5). Although the nonsignificant moderating effect of mayor-council form of government across both violence outcomes is unexpected, we are not the first to find that mayor-council govern-ments are not significantly more responsive to minority populations (e.g., Santoro 1995).

5

6

7

8

1

2

3

4

Low Immigration

Hom

icid

es p

er 1

0,00

0

High ImmigrationAverage Immigration

High Political Incorporation Average Political IncorporationLow Political Incorporation

Figure 1. Predicted Values for Cross-Level Interaction between Minority Political Incorporation, Neighborhood Immigrant Concentration, and Homicide




Perhaps some mayor-council governments do indeed allow for immigrant influence, whereas others may be more attuned to an anti-immi-grant constituency; the operation of mayor-council governments may thus be inconsistent.

In summary, despite some exceptions, we find overall statistical support that immigrant political opportunities enhance the inverse neighborhood-level association between immigrant concentration and violence, espe-cially for homicide.

CONCLUSIONSUrban research typically focuses on neigh-borhood outcomes within one or a small number of cities. As a result, researchers rarely adopt a multilevel comparative approach that appreciates the embedded ecol-ogy of neighborhoods within varied city con-texts. We therefore know little about how larger structural forces at the city level worsen or ameliorate neighborhood dynamics related to the uneven distribution of social problems across neighborhoods. To address this gap, we examined how receptivity of city-level political actors and structures to immigrant concerns shapes the relationship between

neighborhood immigrant concentration and violence. Educing insights from social move-ment and political science literatures, we proposed the concept of immigrant political opportunities to capture the extent that the local political setting is favorable to immi-grant concerns. We hypothesized that the protective relationship between neighborhood immigration and violence does not apply to all neighborhoods equally but rather is con-tingent upon city-level immigrant political opportunities. Specifically, cities that are more receptive to immigrants’ needs and demands should be best able to assist the revi-talization faculty of immigrant concentration.

Our multilevel instrumental variable mod-els support the immigrant revitalization hypothesis and a growing number of studies that point to the protective association between immigrant concentration and neigh-borhood violence. Rather than destabilizing communities and contributing to social disor-ganization, we found that tract-level immi-grant concentration was inversely associated with neighborhood homicide and robbery, on average, across 8,931 Census tracts. Moreover, we found that this average relationship varies significantly across cities and that immigrant

10

14

18

22

26

30

Low Immigration Average Immigration High Immigration

Rob

ber

ies

per

10,

000

Sanctuary City Non-sanctuary City

Figure 2. Predicted Values for Cross-Level Interaction between Sanctuary City Policies, Neighborhood Immigrant Concentration, and Robbery



Lyons et al. 19

political opportunities account for some of this variation. Specifically, cities with immi-grant political opportunities enhance the pro-tective association between neighborhood immigrant concentration and violence, par-ticularly for homicide. For homicide, neigh-borhoods benefit more from immigration when cities have greater political incorpora-tion of Asians and Latinos into city offices and bureaucratic incorporation of minorities into the police force. For both homicide and robbery, pro-immigrant legislation and Dem-ocratic electoral strength enhance the inverse relationship between immigration and vio-lence.

To explain these conditional relationships, we proposed that favorable immigrant politi-cal opportunities reinforce social organization within immigrant neighborhoods by enhanc-ing the trust immigrants place in civic pro-cesses and immigrants’ capacity to exert public social control. That is, political oppor-tunities can reduce immigrants’ marginaliza-tion and social isolation and instead encourage their participation in civic life and collective organization around common goals, including safer neighborhoods. In these ways, political opportunities can facilitate the revitalization capacity of immigrant concentration for neighborhoods. In less receptive contexts, however, immigrants may face greater barri-ers to incorporation and likely greater odds of social and political marginalization. In fact, our results imply that relatively closed regimes may foster processes that disrupt social organization, including immigrant dis-trust of local government, detachment from neighborhoods, and social isolation.

All macro immigration-crime research confronts methodological challenges in iso-lating the aggregate effect of immigration on crime rates. Issues of selectivity in immigrant settlement patterns are difficult to dismiss. But the data we used and the analytic strategy we adopted offer considerable leverage. Peterson and Krivo’s (2010a) pioneering work has made available data unparalleled in scope to assess how contexts across 87 large municipalities influenced the correlates of

crime for nearly 9,000 neighborhoods. Our models took seriously issues of selectivity by controlling for prior immigrant settlement patterns at the tract level and foreign-born population size at the city level. Our results are also robust to attempts to account for endogeneity with 2SRI instrumental variable models. The most fervent skeptic may remain unconvinced that immigration ameliorates neighborhood criminogenic processes, but our research, in conjunction with a large body of supportive work, challenges nativist fears about the dangers of immigration for com-munity viability. Rather, the vilification of immigrants strikes us as representing sym-bolic crusades driven by fear and anxiety about the changing racial fabric of our com-munities (Hagan, Levi, and Dinovitzer 2008; Hagan and Palloni 1999).

We offer four avenues for future research. First, like most macro quantitative research on immigration, we cannot directly observe with our data the mechanisms by which city-level political opportunities influence the neighborhood-level relationship between immigration and violence. A full test of inter-vening mechanisms would require (1) neigh-borhood-level indicators of social organization across various cities, including trust in and ties to civic leaders and institutions, mobiliza-tion, and civic engagement; and (2) sufficient variation across cities in key dimensions of immigrant political opportunities. To date, no data repository exists to examine these pro-cesses related to social organization for the large sample of cities and neighborhoods that we examine with the NNCS. We thus are unable to measure the dimensions of neighborhood social organization that we suggest emanate from favorable immigrant political opportuni-ties at the city level. A comparative ethno-graphic approach (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1999; Hyra 2008) may present a fruitful design for illuminating how differences in immigrant political opportunities interact with commu-nity social organization in shaping crime. Future research, for instance, could compare dynamics related to immigrant concentration, social organization, and crime within a small




number of cities with substantively different immigrant political opportunities.

Second, immigrants have considerable heterogeneity in terms of language, home country, and racial background, which likely complicates the immigration-crime relation-ship. Some scholars suggest addressing this complexity by moving beyond immigrant concentration, a measure of homogeneity that treats all immigrants as a monolithic category, and examining neighborhood levels of lan-guage diversity (see, in particular, Graif and Sampson 2009). In addition, other scholars find that criminal justice contact among immigrants differs by country of origin (Niel-son and Martinez 2011), perhaps due to dif-ferent experiences with racialization in the United States (Provine and Doty 2011). Addi-tional research along these lines would pro-vide more nuance to our understanding of the immigration-violence link.

Third, we concentrate on political dimen-sions of city context. Research should con-tinue to explore the moderating potential of additional cultural, social, and economic con-texts of reception. Segmented assimilation theory, for example, emphasizes the role of ethnic enclaves in aiding immigrant economic mobility (Portes and Zhou 1993). Others note that immigrant destinations with long histo-ries of immigrant settlement provide an array of cultural and social arrangements that facil-itate immigrant incorporation (Waters and Jimenez 2005). These include the presence of legal-aid bureaus and other immigrant-serving organizations, bilingual and health services, job placement centers, and co-ethnic social organizations. Yet in new places of immigrant settlement, such arrangements are typically less well established (Waters and Jimenez 2005). Recent work provides suggestive evi-dence of the implications of immigrant settle-ment patterns for violence at the county (Shihadeh and Barranco 2010), city (Painter-Davis 2012), and tract levels (Ramey 2011; Vélez and Lyons 2012). Shihadeh and Bar-ranco (2010), for example, found that linguis-tic isolation correlates with reductions in Latino homicide victimizations in traditional

immigrant counties but not in new destination counties where immigrants face greater eco-nomic marginalization. Our approach sug-gests that cities with vibrant ethnic enclaves and preexisting immigrant institutional arrangements will condition the presence of social problems within immigrant-concen-trated neighborhoods. Exploring these and similar questions acknowledges the multiple levels of urban ecologies that shape neighbor-hood outcomes. A multilevel analytic frame-work promises to expand our understanding of urban processes and the fate of marginal-ized neighborhoods in both scope and scale.

Fourth, although we expect the patterns we uncovered circa 2000 to hold for U.S. cities and neighborhoods in recent years, since 2000 the United States has experienced con-tinued, yet shifting and uneven, patterns of immigration. As recent controversies in Ari-zona, Georgia, Alabama, and elsewhere sug-gest, state governments have responded in different ways to the evolving face of immi-gration. We encourage additional research to examine the implications for crime of chang-ing immigrant concentrations and political contexts of reception. A second wave of the NNCS would enable scholarship to consider the unfolding and interrelated dynamics of political opportunity structures, immigration, and neighborhood violence.

Our theoretical claim that city-level oppor-tunity structures condition neighborhood-level processes should extend beyond the case of immigration and crime. Opportunity structures likely moderate the relationship between other well-established correlates of neighborhood violence. For instance, decades of research has so often noted the strong cor-relation between minority composition and neighborhood violence that many take the association to be invariant across place. From a social disorganization framework, larger minority proportions may lead to greater rates of violence because of the concentration of economic disadvantages and resulting social isolation associated with minority neighbor-hoods. Yet, as we have shown, neighborhoods are embedded in city structures that partly



Lyons et al. 21

shape the well-being of marginalized com-munities. Cities with greater political, social, and economic opportunities for minorities may be able to counter the social isolation and disorganization faced by minority neigh-borhoods and therefore attenuate the relation-ship between racial composition and violence.

In conclusion, contrary to much public opin-ion and political rhetoric, our research joins a chorus of others in suggesting that immigration generally makes neighborhoods safer. How-ever, the ability of immigration to reduce vio-lence partly depends on the political climate of immigrant reception. Places with favorable immigrant political opportunities seem best able to support the protective association of immigration and crime, presumably because

they facilitate revitalization processes. Our results imply that the punitive anti-immigrant policies enacted in many jurisdictions decrease the benefits of immigration for our communi-ties. These exclusionary tendencies can engen-der mistrust and suspicion on the part of newcomers that erodes involvement in social and political life, attachment to and ownership of neighborhoods, and mobilization on behalf of neighborhood concerns (Aranda and Vaquera 2011). The ability of immigrants to revitalize their communities may depend on how attached immigrants feel toward receiving communities. By marginalizing newcomers, creating political cynicism, and instilling mistrust of the police and local authority, hostile regimes may set in motion the very processes they fear.




APPENDIX

Table A1. First-Stage Model of Immigrant Concentration, NNCS 2000

Model 1 Model 2

b SE b SE

Tract Level (N = 8,931) Disadvantage .400*** .048 .381*** .048 Residential instability .211** .063 .201** .060 Percent young males .019** .007 .019** .007 Spatial lag homicide .0003 .016 Spatial lag robbery .002** .001 Latino tract 1.091** .312 1.078** .303 Black tract –.679*** .137 –.731*** .156 Minority tract .428** .154 .380** .164 Integrated tract .244** .068 .221** .067 Immigration concentration 1990 .611*** .025 .607*** .025

City Level (N = 87 ) Disadvantage –.222*** .065 –.216** .064 Residential mobility .019† .010 .018† .010 Percent Black .002 .004 .001 .004 Percent Latino .001 .006 .0003 .006 Percent foreign born .014** .006 .014** .006 Percent young males –.003 .016 –.003 .016 South –.160† .084 –.154† .084 West –.482*** .098 –.489*** .100 White/Black segregation .001 .003 .0003 .003

Intercept .163** .077 .201** .083Variance Components (SD) Intercept .301*** .298***

Note: SE refers to robust standard errors; tract population 2000 as variable exposure.†p < .10; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 (two-tailed tests).



23

Tabl

e A

2. D

escr

ipti

ves

acro

ss P

olit

ical

Op

por

tun

ity

Reg

imes

(N

= 8

7)

Lat

ino/

Asi

an E

lect

ed O

ffic

ials

Pol

ice

Min

orit

y In

corp

orat

ion

San

ctu

ary

Cit

y

B

elow

Ave

rage

Abo

ve A

vera

geB

elow

Ave

rage

Abo

ve A

vera

geN

oY

es

M

ean

SD

Mea

nS

DM

ean

SD

Mea

nS

DM

ean

SD

Mea

nS

D

Cit

y L

evel

(N

= 8

7 )

D

isad

van

tage

–.04

.83

.19

1.10

–.13

.89

.17

.85

.02

.88

–.07

.85

R

esid

enti

al m

obil

ity

52.3

16.

1154

.17

5.00

53.2

65.

8552

.18

5.97

52.6

75.

8653

.16

6.35

P

erce

nt

Bla

ck19

.70

16.5

015

.93

16.9

614

.96*

13.5

822

.99*

18.5

618

.46

14.9

421

.20

25.3

2

Per

cen

t H

isp

anic

16.9

0*16

.89

29.2

2*20

.67

18.5

116

.12

19.6

021

.06

18.7

019

.10

21.1

615

.32

P

erce

nt

you

ng

mal

es16

.00

2.33

16.1

52.

7815

.77

2.42

16.2

52.

4315

.82

2.38

17.1

42.

49

Per

cen

t fo

reig

n b

orn

14.9

111

.65

17.5

814

.66

15.2

69.

8015

.80

14.7

515

.16

12.7

417

.76

9.84

S

outh

.37

.49

.30

.47

.38

.49

.33

.48

.37

.48

.25

.45

W

est

.22

.42

.45

.51

.31

.47

.24

.43

.24*

.43

.50*

.52

W

hit

e/B

lack

seg

rega

tion

49.4

918

.01

41.0

717

.86

40.9

8*15

.65

54.6

0*18

.31

45.8

717

.85

58.0

417

.72

A

vera

ge t

ract

hom

icid

e co

un

t1.

08.8

31.

08.9

1.8

8*.6

51.

29*

.98

1.27

1.98

1.96

3.20

A

vera

ge t

ract

rob

bery

cou

nt

32.9

220

.92

35.0

322

.69

25.5

1*16

.84

41.8

6*22

.33

39.5

943

.80

53.6

156

.65

N67

2045

4275

12

P

erce

nt

Vot

es f

or G

ore

May

or-C

oun

cil

Gov

ern

men

t

B

elow

Ave

rage

Abo

ve A

vera

geN

oY

es

M

ean

SD

Mea

nS

DM

ean

SD

Mea

nS

D

Cit

y L

evel

(N

= 8

7 )

D

isad

van

tage

.19

.89

–.13

.85

–.18

*.9

1.2

6*.7

7

R

esid

enti

al m

obil

ity

51.1

9*6.

4953

.94*

5.14

54.5

8*5.

5450

.37*

5.54

Per

cen

t B

lack

24.6

4*19

.18

14.3

3*12

.72

14.8

3*13

.92

24.0

0*18

.41

Per

cen

t H

isp

anic

17.4

616

.85

20.2

619

.88

21.0

318

.15

16.4

619

.02

Per

cen

t yo

un

g m

ales

15.9

72.

3216

.03

2.52

16.1

32.

5815

.84

2.23

Per

cen

t fo

reig

n b

orn

15.3

210

.20

15.6

813

.92

16.9

511

.43

13.6

813

.41

Sou

th.2

4*.4

3.4

5*.5

0.4

3.5

0.2

6.4

5

W

est

.29

.46

.27

.45

.37

.49

.16

.37

Wh

ite/

Bla

ck s

egre

gati

on51

.87

17.8

444

.20

17.9

840

.81*

18.1

356

.24*

14.4

2

A

vera

ge t

ract

hom

icid

e co

un

t1.

21.9

5.9

8.7

5.8

5*.6

81.

38*

.95

Ave

rage

tra

ct r

obbe

ry c

oun

t37

.45

20.4

030

.26

21.5

226

.89*

18.6

441

.80*

21.6

3

N40

4749

38

* Den

otes

a s

tati

stic

ally

sig

nifi

can

t d

iffe

ren

ce b

ased

on

t-t

ests

for

equ

alit

y of

mea

ns.




AcknowledgmentsWe are very grateful to Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo for support and data, David Ramey for data assistance, Blake Boursaw for statistical advice, fellow members of the 2011 Summer Research Institute at The Ohio State University (attended by the second author), Leslie Reid and Rob Greenbaum for constructive comments, and Arlene Santoro.

Notes 1. We follow the vast majority of studies and spotlight

the relationship between immigrant concentration and violence. However, the focus on concentra-tion (or homogeneity) may differ from the concern about ethnic and cultural heterogeneity in seminal Chicago-school scholarship on immigration (Graif and Sampson 2009). Within the early social dis-organization perspective, most Chicago-school scholars argued that greater proportions of foreign born contributed to neighborhood heterogeneity, which, in turn, diminished the capacity for social organization (Park and Burgess 1924; Shaw and McKay 1942; Thomas and Znaniecki [1918–1920] 1984; cf. Cohen 1931). Although we return to this issue of conceptualization and measurement in our conclusion, our goal in this article is to test the generalizability of the most common current operationalization of neighborhood immigration (concentration) vis-à-vis immigrant political oppor-tunities.

2. Individual and contextual research finds parallel patterns for immigrant individuals. Immigrants have lower offending rates than their native-born counterparts, and living in communities with greater immigrant concentration reduces the odds of engaging in crime (Butcher and Piehl 1998; Des-mond and Kubrin 2009; Sampson, Morenoff, and Raudenbush 2005). For a more in-depth review of the complexities of the immigration and crime rela-tionship, including historical accounts, see Bursik (2006); Kubrin and Ishizawa (2012); and Martinez and Lee (2000).

3. Among other explanations, some scholars suggest that the process of immigration itself may select for individuals with relatively high levels of achieve-ment ambition, low criminal propensity, or high aversion to risks associated with crime (Butcher and Piehl 1998; Kubrin and Ishizawa 2012; Tonry 1997). Places of immigrant concentration may thus reflect immigrants’ lower aggregate criminal propensity, or immigrants may select into places with lower crime rates. Other scholars suggest that legal surveillance and formal social controls follow immigration flows and dampen local crime rates (Kubrin and Ishizawa 2012; Ousey and Kubrin 2009).

4. A small body of work finds that political threats rather than opportunities mobilize movements as

well (Meyer 2004). Interestingly, and consistent with our core thesis, these arguments tend to be applied to middle-class movements like the anti-nuclear or pro-choice movements of the 1980s, rather than to movements mobilizing economi-cally and racially marginalized constituencies, like Blacks in the 1950s or farm workers in the 1960s.

5. Recent events in East Haven, Connecticut suggest what might happen to immigrant communities when there is no minority incorporation into the police force. The Justice Department accused White patrol officers and high-ranking police officials in East Haven of embarking on a campaign to terror-ize Latino residents. Among other actions, police officers allegedly detained Latinos, particularly immigrants, without reason, assaulted them while they were handcuffed, and arrested residents who attempted to document their behavior (Applebome 2012). This led to widespread fear and suspicion of police; immigrant residents did not believe the police department would enact or pursue immi-grant-friendly policies.

6. Sandoval (2009) also provides evidence that politi-cal context can influence local economic revital-ization. He documents that city authorities had scheduled to redevelop this once blighted area into a high-income neighborhood, a process that would have largely excluded the immigrant community. However, as Latinos became part of the dominant coalition of city government, local residents began to be included in the redevelopment plans, and the plans shifted to benefit existing residents economi-cally. Sandoval (2009) argues that if Latinos were not part of the dominant coalition, such revitaliza-tion would have been hampered. Thus, the ability of immigrant concentration to catalyze economic revitalization may depend partly on the openness of political regimes.

7. This is the same number of cities analyzed by Peter-son and Krivo (2010b).

8. In some cities, homicide and robbery counts are reported for only one or two of the years between 1999 and 2001. In these cases, the three-year count is an estimate derived from available data. Accord-ing to Peterson and Krivo (2010a:8), “when two years of crime counts were provided, the estimate was calculated by multiplying the two year count by 1.5. When only a single year’s crime count was available, the estimate was calculated by multiply-ing the single year count by 3.”

9. All research using official data known to the police is subject to issues about reporting variations, hence our focus on homicide and (separately) robbery. However, we acknowledge the possibility that the political opportunities we measure may encourage residents in open cities to contact the police in the event of witnessing or experiencing crime, inso-far as these contexts facilitate trust with important institutions, including the police. This logic may



Lyons et al. 25

lead us to expect positive main effects of political opportunities on violence or positive interactions between these city contexts and immigrant concen-tration. Although we cannot tease out this plausible mechanism with our data, the results we present are generally inconsistent with this argument.

10. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that these city-level contexts do not operate as a latent construct. Moreover, bivariate correlations among the five vari-ables are weak to moderate. The highest correlation is between percentage voting Democrat in the 2000 general election and sanctuary city status (.396).

11. Although research on police minority represen-tation suggests that Blacks can serve as allies for Latino and Asian constituents, we acknowledge the potential for inter-group hostility between Blacks, Asians, and Latinos (see Bobo and Hutchings 1996; Olzak 1993). The benefit of Black representation may or may not translate into other domains beyond policing, and thus we do not include Blacks in our measure of political incorporation.

12. Most cities in the NNCS pertain to a single county, and thus merging county- and city-level data are straightforward. Four cities in our sample, however, are located in counties that encompass multiple cities. For these cases, we adjusted the percentage Democratic votes by the proportion of the city pop-ulation that resides in each county.

13. Four cities did not have either a mayor-council or a council-manager form of government. Results from using a three-category dummy variable to capture government form, however, did not meaningfully differ from those we report here.

14. Calculated by –.049 +/– 2 (.071) for homicide, and –.046 +/– 2 (.154) for robbery; see Snidjers and Bosker (1999).

15. We present findings from 2SRI multilevel models, although as noted in Tables 2 and 3, the stage-one residuals are not significant in models predicting homicide, providing little evidence of endogene-ity. We see more evidence of endogeneity in mod-els predicting robbery. Regardless of the outcome, however, we found similar patterns to those dis-cussed here when treating immigrant concentration as an exogenous predictor (in noninstrumental vari-able models available upon request) for both homi-cide and robbery.

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Christopher J. Lyons is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. His work focuses on race/ethnicity and sociolegal control, and integrates insights from social disorganization, public social control, racial politics, and political economy per-spectives to account for the spatial distribution of crime across neighborhoods.

María B. Vélez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. Her work focuses on under-standing how racial and economic inequalities pattern urban crime at the individual, neighborhood, and city levels. She also seeks to understand how larger political and economic contexts shape neighborhood dynamics related to crime.

Wayne A. Santoro is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. His work lies at the intersection of race, politics, and social movements. He examines how Blacks and Latinos have mobilized to compel governments to become responsive to commu-nity concerns as well as how these populations in turn have been affected by government actions. Other work investigates Mexican American political mobilization and the political dynamics that took place during the decline of the civil rights movement.



Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities

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