Although there are clearly America specific factors which would need to be taken into account in deciding how valid such a conclusion would be for Australia, it’s interesting to note that sociologists in America have found that immigrants have a lower rate of crime in urban settings. It’s particularly interesting to note that there are unexplained residual factors remaining when variables such as higher rates of employment and two-parent families (which are correlated with lower crime rates) are given their appropriate explanatory weight. The suggestion is that a cultural difference is at work - that America has a high crime culture and over time, people adjust their attitudes and behaviours to those of their environment. The studies also suggest that diversity is a factor in reducing crime rates in particular neighbourhoods, which is consistent with other findings in urban sociology recently - for instance that church going is higher among otherwise similar populations in communities where it’s already strong. In short, what happens is that people both contribute to and reinforce social norms. As I’ve said, you’d have to be a bit guarded in drawing too many conclusions in Australia, but it would not be overly surprising if the behaviour of “Lebanese gangs” might be more related to their socialisation into a culture where aggression and violence are common among marginal young men. Without wishing to slag off at the Emerald City, it may well be the case that such a culture is particularly present in Sydney - given that similar problems and tensions have not arisen in other cities with high populations of second-generation immigrant men.
Skepticism about a link between increased crime and immigration isn’t entirely new. Working in the 1920s and ’30s, at the end of the country’s last great wave of immigration, criminology pioneers Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin found that immigrants had lower crime rates than both native-born Americans and second-generation immigrants. It was American culture, Sutherland and Sellin concluded, that caused crime, and the less exposure to it one had the less likely one was to be a criminal.
Published earlier this year, the study led by Harvard’s Sampson echoed these earlier surveys. Sampson and his colleagues followed a diverse group of nearly 3,000 Chicago youths from 1995 to 2002, and found that immigrant kids were less likely than peers of similar socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in everything from gang fights to arson to purse snatchings. Not only that, but even nonimmigrant kids who happened to live in immigrant neighborhoods were less likely than otherwise to be involved in violence.
There are other explanations Mark.
It doesn’t seem too far fetched that Lebanese gangs have harrassed people on the beach because of cultural hostility to certain customs - most particularly women being exposed in a way that was considered indecent in all ‘developed’ cultures until about forty years ago. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to imagine that, as in the reports the gangs behaved with aggressive contempt towards such things. And it is understandable that people became insensed at this behaviour. I’d be incensed if I and/or a woman I knew was a victim.
It goes without saying that the indiscriminate mob violence that errupted in response is a disgrace that should be resisted with the full force of the law.
That may well be true, Nicholas, but as a number of women from Cronulla have commented, the attitude of the surfers themselves to “their women” wasn’t all that flash either.
Immigrants to Australia are likely to increase crime *rates* because they add to the total population (with most crime rates expressed per 100,000) and are generally selected to fit in, so of below average propensity to commit crime. The Lebanese that are causing trouble now probably would not have been admitted under current policies.
However for immigration to reduce crime in absolute terms the effects of their positive social norms must outweigh the fact that inevitably some migrants will break the law.
Andrew, I’m not sure of your statistical reasoning here - if a crime rate is expressed as a percentage of 100 000 that’s to make it comparable regardless of population increase.
Naomi - Their parents, obviously. They have low levels of skills and would struggle to get admitted.
Mark - Say the theft rate among the native born is 3,500 per 100,000, or 3.5%. Add 20,000 carefully selected migrants, who commit 200 additional thefts, making 3,700 out of 120,000, or 3.08%. The asbolute number of crimes is higher, but relative to population the rate has declined.
Ok, gotcha, Andrew, was a bit confused.
Andrew Norton on 3 January 2006 at 6:13 pm
Andrew Norton is a rotten Strocchi-ite in both scientific approach and substantive policy disposition. Why is his name not dirt amongst all right thinking people?
He kicks off elsewhere by underlining the crucial distinction between racial and cultural differences, which has been so mendaciously blurred by our cultural elites. I have been banging on about the multiracial v multicultural difference for ages.
This is a reference the critical importance of people quality in immigration. I have harped on the priority of people selection over cultural settlement policy more times than I care to admit.
Andrew Norton here delivers a free lesson in baby stats (ratios fer crissake!) combined with a sotto voce reference to North East Asian immigrants, who present with an almost invisible crime rate. No prizes for guessing which tactless brute has been blurting this out all over the internet.
How come he says the same things as me, yet winds up bathed in kisses by all and sundry. Whilst I am sentenced to the dog house. Why is it so?
I guess it must be my resistable charm.
Mark on 3 January 2006 at 6:21 pm
Ohh puh-leese! I think I am going to puke.
Is that an example of your resistable charm, Jack?
And I guess there’s never any time in your life when you’ve had to ask for clarification after not seeing the point immediately?
In any case, since as you’ve claimed in response to me before, you’re a good Weberian and are guided by the empirical evidence on these questions, I wonder what your interpretation of the US studies might be.
Mark on 4 January 2006 at 12:56 am
I have to get up early and do my non-Weberian style paid work tomorrow. The study is a syllabus of errors which I will refute chapter and verse, as soon as I get the time.
PS. Hope I wasn’t out of line with that crack about puking.
I don’t know whether or not you were out of line, Jack, but when I skimmed Andrew’s comment I was tired and in the middle of my paid work, and I asked for clarification. We’re none of us infallible, my friend.