Abstract
The notion persists that recent immigrants commit substantively more serious crimes than citizens, but prior research has only used aggregate-level data or youth-focused samples. We address this gap using individual-level 2017 crime arrest data from the Houston Police Department (HPD) that include citizenship, supplemented by Houston Super Neighborhoods data and American Community Survey estimates. We conduct bivariate and multilevel multinomial analyses to compare crime characteristics and neighborhood-level influences on offending by citizenship, finding that non-U.S. citizen arrestees were less likely to have been arrested for felonies, drug crimes, and Part I property crimes than U.S. citizen arrestees. An exploration of neighborhood contextual influences and interaction effects reveals further nuances. Directions for future research and implications for evidence-based policy are discussed.
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