Revisiting Violence in New Destinations: Exploring the Drop in Latino Homicide Victimization in Emerging Immigrant Communities, 2000 to 2010

ABSTRACT

The turn of the twentieth century brought important demographic shifts among Latinos, including increasing settlement of both foreign-born and domestic Latinos into “new destination” regions and communities with little previous exposure to such populations. In turn, some scholars find higher rates of Latino victimization in these new destination communities, but there is little empirical research exploring whether and how these same locales fare today. Our goal is to address this gap in the literature by examining how lethal violence against Latinos in new immigrant destination communities has changed over the 2000 to 2010 decade. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System, we construct hybrid fixed- and random-effects models to examine the predictors of changes in Latino homicide victimization over time. Results suggest that (1) despite the turmoil of the Great Recession, new destinations experienced a sizable drop in Latino victimization, (2) this drop has resulted in new destinations now having lower levels of Latino victimization than other destination types, and (3) 70% of this change is attributable to changes in Latino family structure, including married and extended families, as well as changes in language use in new destinations. We conclude by discussing our findings and their implications for researchers and policymakers.

Notes

¹Barranco (2013; Shihadeh and Barranco 2010a, 2013) focused solely on homicide, while Ramey (2013) focused on both homicide and robbery. In our study, we focus solely on homicide because ethnically disaggregated robbery rates are not available for all U.S. counties, which serve as our unit of analysis.

²In 1980, the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempted to add Latinos to the SHR forms, but due to several complications they abandoned the attempt mid-decade (Fox 2005; see Martinez [1996] for an article that attempted to use this data). Therefore, the only available nationwide data on Latino homicide come from the NVSS.

³The data were specially requested from the CDC and include all geographic areas, regardless of population size.

⁴We tried alternative definitions of “new destinations,” but they were substantively similar to the method employed here and produced (1) nearly identical samples and (2) consistent results.

⁵Correlations among the three measures range from .07 to .48, and variance inflation factors in our saturated models are all below acceptable thresholds (largest was 3.0), suggesting that multicollinearity was not a problem in our models.

⁶The entropy index (E) is a multigroup (Black, White, and Latino) measure of the diversity of a geographic area, calculated as M

where πm is the proportion of people in race/ethnicity m (e.g., proportion Black) and M is the total number of racial/ethnic groups (three for the current study) (Reardon and Firebaugh 2002). E scores were divided by their maximum values to impose a standardized range of 0 to 1. E has a minimum value of 0 when a census place has no diversity and is entirely composed of one racial/ethnic group and a maximum value of 1 when Blacks, Whites, and Latinos are equally represented.

⁷Consistent with prior categorizations of immigrant destinations (Singer 2004), places such as Baldwin County, Alabama; DeKalb County, Illinois; Burke County, North Carolina; and Manassas County, Virginia, are classified as new destinations, while locales such as San Diego County, California; Queens County, New York; and El Paso County, Texas, fall into the traditional destinations.

⁸Safer in terms of homicide victimization—the most serious form of violent victimization. However, as previously noted, other researchers have shown that less serious forms of violent victimization (i.e., robbery) may be higher in new destinations, at least at earlier time points and in cross-sectional studies.

⁹Although it is also possible that new destinations were less impacted by the Great Recession compared to traditional destinations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raymond Barranco

Raymond Barranco is an Assistant Professor in Department of Sociology at Mississippi State University. His research broadly focuses on violence, race/ethnicity, and immigration. His published work has appeared in Social Forces, The Sociological Quarterly, Social Science Research, and other venues.

Casey T. Harris

Casey T. Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Arkansas and Co-Director of the Center for Social Research. His work focuses on the intersection of stratification and crime with an emphasis on communities and crime, racial and ethnic disparities in offending and arrest, immigration and migration, and quantitative methodology.

Ben Feldmeyer

Ben Feldmeyer is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. His research explores themes of crime, criminology theory, race/ethnicity, punishment and sentencing, and immigrant assimilation.