Sunday, March 12, 2006

Immigration and Crime

Tyler Cowan at Volokh.com links to an op-ed in the Times on the relationship of immigration and the crime rate. The professor says that studies show that immigrants have a lower crime rate than natives, more generally that Hispanics do better on socio-economic indicators than would be expected at the gross level. (i.e., many immigrants are young males living apart from women, the group we'd expect to have the highest crime rate.)

As I said in comments there, I think the professor oversells his thesis, but it is a reminder not to generalize. It would also be interesting to look at the cultural patterns related to years of residence of family (i.e., obesity, cancer rates, etc. etc.)

No comments: