Immigration, Social Integration and Crime

Luigi Solivetti

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134008643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

The problem of social control has constituted the acid test for the entire issue of immigration and integration. But whilst recent studies show that the crime rate for non-nationals is three, four or more, times higher than that of the country's 'own' citizens, academic interest in these statistics has been inhibited by the political difficulties they raise. Immigration, Social Integration and Crime addresses this issue directly. Providing a thorough analysis of immigration and crime rates in all of the main European countries, as well as examining the situation in the US, Luigi M. Solivetti concludes that the widespread notion that a large non-national population produces high crime rates must be rejected. Noting the undeniably substantial, but significantly variable, contribution of non-nationals to crime statistics in Western Europe, he nevertheless goes on to analyze and explain the factors that influence the relationship between immigration and crime. It is the characteristics of the 'host' countries that are shown to be significantly associated with non-nationals' integration and, ultimately, their involvement in crime. In particular, Solivetti concludes, it is 'social capital' in the host societies – comprized of features such as education, transparency, and openness – that plays a key role in non-nationals' integration chances, and so in their likelihood to commit crime. Supported by extensive empirical data and statistical analysis, Immigration, Social Integration and Crime provides an invaluable contribution to one of the most pressing social and political debates – in Europe, and elsewhere.

Chapter 1
The debate on immigration and criminality

Past and present

1.1 Immigration and criminality: some basic questions

The phenomenon of immigration seems, by its very nature, to be a catalyst of problems, to pose fundamental questions about our society, and to require adaptation and therefore change. It is enough to think of the incorporation of immigrants in the workforce and the adaptation this requires of them; the impact it produces on often inflexible labour markets; the difficult cultural and social adjustment of immigrants to their new country of adoption; and the cultural re-adaptation that their presence requires of the indigenous population itself. All this contains strong and often salutary elements of change and development, both for immigrants and for the society that receives them. Nonetheless, for various reasons, in part psychological, in part social, and in particular as a result of possible xenophobic reactions, a more disturbing, even threatening, aspect emerges from the scenario of migratory phenomena: this aspect is the relation between immigration and criminality.

The character of this relation is widely disputed; considerable differences of view about it exist, not only between politicians, but also between experts, while at a more general level a divergence of view between the expert and the layman can be perceived. The divergences begin with the term ‘immigrant’ itself. It is not so unambiguous as might be supposed. The term is used to identify, in the various countries, those subjects that belong to categories that only in part coincide. These divergences can be traced, in our view, to cultural and organizational traits peculiar to the various countries; more specifically to different ways of regarding the phenomenon of migration and the relation between immigrants and the host society. In the countries of continental Europe, characterized by the centrality of the State and its bureaucratic apparatus, the semantic value of the term is bound up with the question whether the immigrant has or has not been accorded the same rights as the citizen born and bred in the country in question. The immigrant, seen from this point of view, is, therefore, in essence the non-national, i.e. the non-citizen. And so the gathering of information in the countries of continental Western Europe was first of all focused on this dichotomy between national and non-national citizens. Analyses of the criminality of immigrants have also made extensive use of this concept and therefore focused their attention on the criminality of non-nationals. The preference given to the concept of nationality/non-nationality has also been reinforced by the fact that immigration to Western Europe was predominantly temporary in the decades following the Second World War: it was the boom period of the guest worker. Seen in this light, the alternative category of the foreign-born – a category comprising also those who have assumed the citizenship of the host country – seemed of little interest. A consequence of the preference given to the non-nationals category is that as soon as the immigrant receives the citizenship of his host country he tends to merge with the mass of other citizens, and the information about him becomes correspondingly thin. Not surprisingly, the available information on the children of immigrants, born in the host country and citizens of it, is extremely scarce, in spite of the fact that various studies, especially in North America, drew attention, already in the first half of the twentieth century, to the particular problems of integration and deviance that these subjects posed (see below in this chapter).

The distinction between citizens – whatever be their origin – and non-nationals was adopted by the EU and its statistical studies agency, Eurostat. Some countries, however, seem disinclined to follow this approach. In the United Kingdom, and to a lesser degree in Holland, the colonial past – combined with a lesser state-dominated tradition – seems to re-surface in the tendency to use the concept of ethnicity, or ethnic group, and thus to draw a distinction between whites and others (blacks, Asians), rather than between citizens and non-nationals. In the UK, for example, data relating to the nationality of subjects arrested and sentenced by the courts have never been collected, whereas the studies that distinguish them on the basis of their ethnic origin are numerous. This approach has at least the advantage of permitting those who are immigrants, but who have since become citizens of their host country, or who are the children of immigrants, to be easily identified, but it naturally ignores the citizenship variable and its possible repercussions on integration. In the USA – in conformity with its tradition of light statehood – the concept of citizenship has not assumed any priority in the analysis of the problems of immigration. The dominant concept has been that of birth in the national territory, a concept that indirectly emphasizes the importance of being born and bred in the country. North American institutions and academics accordingly attach priority to the dichotomy native/foreign-born in analysing criminality. Together with the concept of foreign-born, considerable emphasis is placed in the USA on ethnicity (whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians), also as a consequence of the existence in the country of a large population of African-Americans, who although they have been American citizens for centuries continue to be characterized by differentials in terms of their economic level, education, employment and share in criminality.

These contrasts between the categories that can be distinguished within the concept of immigrant have inevitably channelled in different ways the analyses of the whole problem of immigration and crime. In spite of this, it may be said that this problem revolves round a basic question: whether the contribution to criminality of immigrants – identified with one or other of the categories described above – is quantitatively and qualitatively different from that of the indigenous population.

The perception of a high rate of criminality among foreigners has often emerged in the Western world, especially in the nations in which the immigration rate has been particularly high, as in France. Already in the years 1860–70, the rate of criminality of foreigners in France was considered far higher than that of native-born French people (roughly five times higher: Tarde 1895); for example, in 1867 alone, the year of the Exposition Universale in Paris, no fewer than 1,544 Italian children were arrested in that city for vagabondage and begging (Du Camp 1870).

In the USA, there was a widespread conviction that immigration had fuelled the growth of crimes of violence against the person, of behaviour contrary to public order and of offences connected with prostitution (US Senate Documents 1911; Laughlin 1922; US National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1931).

Nonetheless, various empirical studies conducted in the twentieth century in countries with a high rate of immigration have denied any higher percentage of criminal activity in the foreign population. The US Senate Report of 1911 found that the percentage of immigrants among the prison population was not higher than the percentage of immigrants in the general population; and, what’s more, that immigrants were on average involved in less serious misdemeanours than natives; even if, as regards juvenile delinquents, immigrants were over-represented, while even more pronounced was the over-representation of the children of immigrants among the prison population (US Senate Documents 1911). A few years later, the US National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (1931) discovered that, in spite of the evident conditions of disadvantage in social and economic terms in which new arrivals found themselves, the popular image that represented them as prone to crime was unfounded. In effect, the Commission, analysing the figures relating to incriminations, found widely different rates of criminality in the various groups of immigrants; but it had not ascertained any direct relation between immigration and crime; indeed, the overall rate of criminality for foreign-born whites was substantially lower than that of native-born whites (208 contra 347) and a great deal lower than the rate for native-born blacks. In the same years, the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1933), no longer found significant differences between children of immigrants and children of natives in terms of prison admissions. Sutherland (1924) summed up his point of view on the relation between immigration and criminality by asserting that it had been reversed. Since ‘fresh’ immigrants had on average lower rates of criminality than natives, whereas with the passage of time their rates – and especially that of their children – gradually rose and came to resemble more closely those of natives, the inference could be drawn, he argued, that the criminality of immigrants was the effect of their association with natives and with their values; in other words, immigrants did not import criminality but absorbed it from the host society. Several years later, Taft (1936), adopting much the same perspective, not only confirmed the higher rates of criminality of the second generations but pointed out that the percentage of persons who ended up in prison was actually lower in the States in which there was a prevalence of fresh immigrants. Not surprisingly, in the light of these findings, the identification of immigrants as criminals in the USA at the start of the twentieth century was reinterpreted, some decades later, as a symbolic crusade, aimed at exorcising the fear determined by the far-reaching changes (urbanization, industrialization) taking place in American society (Gusfield 1963).

Similar findings have been confirmed elsewhere. Thus, in Canada, at the end of the 1960s, the rate of criminality attributed to immigrants (sentenced and imprisoned) was lower than the rate of criminality attributed to natives (Canada, Department of the Solicitor General 1974; Giffen 1976). In Germany, Zimmermann (1966) found a lower rate of criminality in immigrants than in natives. In Switzerland, Neumann (1963) pointed out that the image of foreigners, and in particular of Italians, as responsible for a high level of criminality found no confirmation in the empirical data; and Gillioz (1967), in spite of the considerable presence of foreigners in Switzerland, did not find any consequent increase of the national crime rate. In Belgium, the studies of Liben (1963) and Debuyst (1970) concluded that the level of criminality of immigrant youth was no higher than that of native-born youth. In France, Robert et al. (1968) ascertained a rate of criminality among male immigrant youth only slightly higher than natives of the same age group and gender. By contrast, in the UK, both McClintock and Gibson (1961) and Bottoms (1967) found the rate of criminality of Irish immigrants far higher than that of natives. And a few years later, the research of Desdevides (1976) in France reached alarming conclusions about the over-representation of immigrants in the crime statistics at Nantes.

At least by the start of the 1980s, however, the studies on the criminality of non-nationals in Europe seem to indicate the emergence of a new phase. This change in the theoretical debate seems to have come about concurrently with an alteration in the characteristics of immigration to Western Europe. The new waves of immigrants seem to have consisted of individuals who, as we have already mentioned in our Introduction, mainly came from countries more distant from Europe than had been the case in the past. These immigrants were attracted to Europe no longer by the high demand for labour in the European countries, as had been the case before (in the boom years of the Wirtschaftswunder), but seem to have been stimulated mainly by their own offer of work (Barbagli 1998). Their arrival in Europe had as a rule in no way been encouraged by European governments, as had been the case when their role as additional manpower had been requested; their presence in Europe, on the contrary, was often characterized by illegality or irregularity. In any case, these new studies conducted on immigration and crime by various scholars in a series of European countries (e.g. Andersson 1984; Junger-Tas 1985; Albrecht 1988; Natale 1988; Junger 1989; Albrecht 1993; Hebberecht 1997; Martens 1997; Tournier 1997; Killias 1997; Barbaret and García-España 1997; Suisse 2001) tended to produce results which were not necessarily homogeneous but which did agree on one basic tendency: they ascertained, that is, a rate of criminality among immigrants that was on average far higher (from two to four times higher) than that of the national population considered. The official data relating to the non-nationals incriminated for various offences show that on average non-nationals are over-represented, in proportion, that is, to their share of the overall population of the country. A similar situation was ascertained for the rate of non-nationals among the prison population in almost all European countries, a rate that was higher than the percentage of non-nationals among the country’s total population (see further, Chapter 5).

This trend, which seems to be confirmed throughout Western Europe, is not, however, a universal phenomenon. Nothing similar was ascertained in North America, given that the crime rates of foreign-borns in both the USA and Canada remained lower or at any rate no higher than those of natives (Butcher and Piehl 1997; Reid et al. 2005; Rumbaut et al. 2006; Hagan et al. 2008). At the start of the twenty-first century, the rates of imprisonment in the USA for the critical age group 18–39 years were some five times higher for all natives than those registered for all foreign-borns. The rates for imprisonment for foreign-borns, however, were not homogeneous: they differed greatly depending on ethnic group. In the case of some nationalities of the Hispanic ethnic group, high rates of imprisonment, similar to or higher than those of all natives, were registered. But, in comparison between natives and foreign-borns belonging to the same ethnic group, the foreign-borns invariably showed lower rates of criminality (Rumbaut and Ewin 2007). So it is not surprising that the second generations should continue to have higher crime rates than the first (Morenoff and Astor 2006; Hagan et al. 2008).

From these multifarious and often conflicting data, which refer in the main to a rather long time span, the impression was derived that the relation between the phenomena of immigration and crime is ambiguous; that it is not stable in time; and that it may assume different connotations in the various national contexts. Even the hypothesis that non-national communities in Europe currently contribute disproportionately to the scale of criminality needs to be better qualified. It should be pointed out that this hypothesis does not imply that all groups of non-nationals present in the various countries of Western Europe are over-represented in the judicial and penitentiary statistics. In fact, in each country of Western Europe there are national groups (or ethnic minorities) that are over-represented, and other national groups (or other ethnic minorities) that are under-represented (Tonry 1997). In other words, the over-representation of non-nationals is the overall result of the sum of the very different rates of criminality in the various groups of non-nationals. For example, in the UK the rates of criminality for Indians and Pakistanis are far lower than those relating to groups coming from the West Indies, and not dissimilar from those of the general population (Smith 1997; see also Radzinowicz and King 1977). In the Netherlands, Turkish and Chinese immigrants present far lower rates that those of other groups coming from North Africa and the Caribbean (Junger-Tas 1997).

Therefore, to consider all groups of immigrants as over-represented in the crime statistics is unfounded. But this is not the only misconception. Let us examine the overall contribution of immigrants to the statistics of national criminality in the various European countries. The above-mentioned studies conducted in recent decades and, even more so, popular opinion, have concurred in considering that this contribution is widely disproportionate if compared with the percentage of immigrants among the resident population. On the basis of all this, the growing presence of immigrants has been perceived as the cause of the growth in crime in Western Europe. But this is a logical short circuit. For any over-representation of immigrants in the crime statistics does not at all imply that, assuming a growth of criminality has been ascertained at least for certain offences, this growth is essentially due to immigrants. This is a fundamental point that has unfortunately been widely ignored in most of the studies cited above. This problem needs to be analysed in greater detail, with the aim of ascertaining whether, and to what extent, the contribution of immigrants to criminality is reflected in the overall trend of crime (see further, Chapter 4).

In any case, while there is some degree of concordance about the fact that high average rates of criminality have been registered for non-nationals in the countries of Western Europe, the reason or the reasons for this phenomenon remain uncertain and contested. A variety of hypotheses, applicable to crime in general, have been used to explain the criminality of immigrants. Some of these seem more significant, or more plausible, today, also in the light of the results produced by empirical studies that have referred to these specific hypotheses.

The hypothesis of deviant forms of behaviour on the part of non-nationals as a consequence of the existence of a strain, i.e. of a tension of anomic type, has a long history behind it. Already Durkheim in the later nineteenth century had introduced the concept of anomie both in general terms and with specific reference to the conduct of non-nationals. At the general level, Durkheim identified anomie as a substantial lack of social or moral standards (the Greek term anomia means lack of rules), and more specifically as a lack of restraints on individual aspirations. The context in which this took place is characterized by rapid social and especially cultural change, which generates an uncontrolled expansion of the aspirations induced by society (particularly in the industrial and commercial sectors), to which no effective ability to realize them could correspond (Durkheim 1893). More specifically, Durkheim himself (1897), in examining the phenomenon of suicide, ascertained that the frequency of deviant forms of behaviour among immigrants was far higher than among natives.

Formulated in the context of the rapid social and economic transformation of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, the concept of anomie and its reference to immigration had no difficulty in being translated into the context of the USA, where both the conditions of rapid change and the continuous influx of immigrants seemed to prepare a fertile terrain for its application. Thus, Thomas and Znaniecki, in their famous research on the immigration of Polish peasants to the USA, were undoubtedly influenced by the concepts formulated by Durkheim. They related the alienation and deviance of immigrants to a situation of social disorganization; i.e. to a situation characterized by the diminishing influence of social rules of conduct, as in particular in the case in which ‘the old system that controlled more or less effectively the behaviour of members of the group disintegrated so rapidly that the development of a new social system fails to keep step with the process of disintegration’ (1918–1920, vol. 5: 165–166).

A few years later, Park, in 1925, described the situation of immigrants in the USA and its relation to the phenomenon of crime. Park noted that, for immigrants of the first generation, the social rituals, customs and moral order that characterized their countries of origin were in some way transferred by immigrants themselves to the host country and continued to subsist for a considerable period, in spite of the influence of North American culture; it played a role of containing any pressure to engage in criminal activity. But this social control disappeared when this system of values weakened and declined, and when attempts were made to replace the social control exercised by customs with the lesser restraints of the ...

Table of contents

• Contemporary issues in public policy
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The debate on immigration and criminality
• Chapter 2 The research project
• Chapter 3 National and non-national population in Western Europe
• Chapter 4 Criminality in the countries of Western Europe
• Chapter 5 Non-nationals in prison, non-nationals charged
• Chapter 6 Indicators of socio-economic condition, integration and origin
• Summary and conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Appendix I Crime rates and foreign-borns in the USA
• Appendix II Non-nationals and crime rates in Western Europe
• Appendix III Non-nationals in prison and characteristics of the various European countries
• Index