Immigrant status and the desire for a low profile from police

ABSTRACT

Research into immigrant behaviors continues to expand as scholarship explores mechanisms surrounding the immigrant-crime paradox. An important and underexplored area in quantitative research surrounds low profile behaviors. The term “low profile” refers to a set of behaviors that immigrants and immigrant groups adopt to reduce or mitigate exposure to a variety of risky environments and institutional threats, particularly the police. This study explores the relationship between immigrant statuses and low profile behaviors in communities using data from El Paso County, Texas neighborhoods. El Paso offers unique insight into a binational border context that has historically welcomed immigrants and immigrant groups. The results suggest that being a first-generation immigrant predicts the belief that neighbors are likely to keep a low profile from the police; however, once culture and neighborhood-level factors are taken into consideration, this effect wanes. These findings emphasize the importance of low profile behaviors for future study.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• low profile from police
• immigration and crime
• El Paso
• immigrant experience
• low profile behaviors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

Due to the use of secondary data in this article, this study was granted exemption by the Institutional Review Board at The University of Texas at El Paso (study number 1973835-1).

Notes

1 The inclusion of 1.5-generation is important and distinguishes itself for two important reasons. First, this category depends on age of migration. As Rumbaut (2004) described, often times this designation is provided to immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. Second, migration at this key developmental stage is relevant as acculturation to U.S., and in our case México, may vary somewhat compared to those who came as adults. They had the opportunity to experience their home country during pre-adolescence, but still migrated at a time where they were still developing and endured a unique in-between cultural experience.

2 This study initially considered other possibly relevant factors such as Hispanic, prior victimization, perception of crime, and acculturation to the U.S. However, there are several reasons these were removed from the final analysis. First, there was a need to streamline the analysis to allow for a more parsimonious model. Second, there was conceptual/operational overlap depending on the factor. For example, while including the ethnicity of the respondent is important, 78 percent of the respondents are Hispanic. Given the locale of study and other factors more directly related to the outcome (e.g., enculturation to México, Latina/o immigrants in neighborhoods), we elected to remove it.