Absara Hassan
Response 2: Ramiro Martinez, Abel Valenzuela, Jr ed., Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence
As America increasingly experiences flow of people from other nations, debates arise concerning the relationship between immigration and crime. According to Ramiro Martinez, these debates are futile, as there really is no substantial evidence to prove the detrimental effects of immigration on crime rates. In his book, Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence, Martinez highlights criminal immigrant stereotypes by providing examples from social scientists and intellectuals, and then refuting their statements with his own argument supported by statistical facts, before introducing “the reality of immigrant crime”.
Martinez narrows in on specific individuals who have expressed their bias against immigrants in relation to crime. For example, he states Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, who makes accusations against the Cuban immigrant group for being responsible for the high levels of crime in Miami every year between 1985 and 1993. Martinez, in disagreement with the professor of political science, provides the truth behind the misconception, by saying that “published research demonstrates that the Mariel Cuban homicide victim and offending rates rose in the early 1980’s, approaching those of African Americans at one point, but then declined to levels of other Latinos and non-Latino whites by 1985, the starting date of Huntington’s concerns about Cubanization” (Martinez, 4). Martinez does this with many inaccurate statements on immigrants and criminality made by other academicians.
Ramiro Martinez strengthens his stance on the topic by taking the readers into the source of crime. Numerous times, he mentions studies that show no correlation between immigrant groups and crime rates. It turns out that “crime was concentrated in specific types of areas, regardless of ‘nativity and nationality’… It was not immigrants or blacks per se but the conditions in which they settled that were important for juvenile crime” (Martinez, 7). Martinez further supports the dissociation between immigration and crime by bringing up the relatively new reasoning that an influx of immigrants may actually decrease crime by encouraging “new forms of social organization and adaptive social structures” (Martinez 10).
This idea from Martinez connects to Jenna Weissman Joselit’s Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community. The first few statements from Joselit’s book discusses the praise given to the Jewish community because of their “reputation for being among the more law-abiding and peaceful of the nation’s citizenry” (Joselit, 1). However, Jewish crime emerged later on, shocking the community. Leaders of the Jewish community believed that the crime committed “was a consequence of the immigrant experience and not the result of some genetic, built-in defect” (Joselit, 11). This goes hand in hand with the beliefs expressed in Martinez’s account, which again, says that it is the experience, the conditions, that give rise to crime and not the background/ethnicity of the community itself.
Questions:
- What are the specific situations/areas in which crime has decreased as a result of immigration?
- Martinez mainly focuses on the Latino community, while Joselit discusses the Jewish community. What other immigrant communities endure criminal immigrant stereotypes?
