When Ramiro Martinez began his study of Latino crime in the United States 30 years ago, he thought he knew what to expect. “I assumed that places that had more immigrants would have more homicides,” says Martinez, a Northeastern University professor of sociology, criminology and criminal justice. “That was the [common] assumption at that time point in the ’80s and ’90s. “And so when we started looking at that first run of data, I thought there was something wrong.” The data showed that immigrants — legal and illegal — were having a positive effect on their communities. Those findings are collected in his book, “Latino Homicide: Immigration, Violence, and Community.”
“We found something that was opposite to what we thought,” Martinez says. “We found that more Latinos meant less violence in many communities across the United States.”
Martinez and his Northeastern colleague Jacob Stowell, who rank among the leading experts in the field, say their research over the past three decades has disproved assertions that immigration exposes American communities to increases in crime. “There aren’t a whole lot of things in my understanding that are the complete opposite of what people believe,” Stowell, a Northeastern associate professor of criminology and criminal justice, says of the immigration debate. “This is one of them.”
