International migration and cross-national homicide: considering the role of economic development

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the longitudinal relationship between international migration and homicide using a sample of 88 developed and developing countries from 1993 to 2015. Drawing on research demonstrating that (1) economic development reduces violent crime within countries, and (2) migrants often move to countries with improving economic conditions in search of better economic opportunities, we test the hypothesis that the relationship between international migration and homicide is spurious at the cross-national level, as both factors may be attributed to economic development. Using fixed-effects regression, we find that a negative direct association between international migration and homicide is explained by economic development. We conclude that an increase in international migration and a decrease in homicide may both be consequences of a broader process of development.

KEYWORDS:

• Homicide
• international migration
• economic development
• correlates of homicide
• cross-national criminology

Acknowledgments

All authors contributed equally to this project. The authors would like to thank Dr. Wade Jacobsen for his helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. The last wave (2013 to 2015) covers only three years.

2. The UNODC works closely with national governments to improve the validity and comparability of homicide statistics (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2015). Moreover, homicide data are validated by (1) comparing data of countries with similar characteristics, (2) comparing the consistency with data submitted in the past, (3) analysing countries’ responses to questions regarding the origin of homicide data, and (4) verifying the consistency between homicide data reported in other sources including the World Health Organisation’s Mortality Database (WHO-MD). Contemporary research evaluating cross-national homicide data finds that while the UN and WHO homicide data differ slightly in magnitude, both sources produce similar outcomes in statistical analyses (Andersson & Kazemian, 2018; Huebert & Brown, 2019).

3. The correlation between GDP and the alternative measures discussed above are: infant mortality (r = −.788; p <.001), education index (r =.693; p <.001), and percent young (r = −.649, p <.001).

4. This value corresponds to the exponential of −.350 minus 1.

5. Table C1 provides the variance inflation factors (VIF) for each model with more than one covariate. The table demonstrates that multicollinearity is not a concern in Models 2 or 5 as the VIF is below three for each variable. Multicollinearity becomes an issue in Models 3 and 6 as the VIF rises above four (Fox, 2009).

6. One notable exception is Light (2017, p. 236) who included state gross domestic product as an additional measure of macroeconomic growth and found that a negative association between Latino immigration and violent crime in the United States remained.

7. The recently published dataset presents estimates of international migrant by age, sex and origin for 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2019 and are available for all countries of the world. The data are available at: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimates19.asp

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mateus Rennó Santos

Mateus Rennó Santos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on crime and criminal justice trends, particularly on the drivers of changes in the rates of violence of populations, and on testing macro-level criminological theory.

Douglas B. Weiss

Douglas B. Weiss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, San Bernardino. His research interests include developmental and life course criminology, comparative criminology and criminal justice, substance use, and corrections.

Alexander Testa

Alexander Testa is an Assistant Professor Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include the consequences of criminal justice contact, criminal justice decision-making, the impact of social structure on crime and punishment, and social determinants of health.