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

Using 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 an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American sociological review 2013-08, Vol.78 (4), p.604-632
Main Authors: Lyons, Christopher J., Vélez, María B., Santoro, Wayne A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Census
Censuses
Cities
City politics
Control
Crime
Demographics
Ethnicity
Hispanics
Homicide
Immigrants
Immigration
Legislation
Marginality
Neighborhoods
Neighbourhoods
Noncitizens
Opportunities
Police
Political actors
Political Factors
Political violence
Politics
Rural and urban sociology
Social control
Social organization
Social Organizations
Sociology
Trust
Urban crime
Urban sociology
Violence
Violent crime
Violent crimes
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Summary:Using 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.
ISSN:0003-1224
1939-8271
DOI:10.1177/0003122413491964