ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Illegal Immigrants



Illegal Immigrants

Introduction

Understanding the victimization of immigrants was of great importance to pioneer victimologist Hans von Hentig, who listed “the immigrant” as one of thirteen categories in his 1948 typology of victims. As an immigrant himself, he knew how vulnerable immigrants can be. He described the experience as a temporary reduction to an extreme degree of helplessness in human relations. Despite von Hentig's interest, victimologists did not pursue the topic until recently. The new interest in immigrant victimization is usually billed under more politically compelling rubrics like trafficking of human beings, hate crime, or domestic abuse, or it is recast in terms of studies of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. These labels are expedient for research purposes, but they do not address the fact that being a foreigner and a minority member makes an individual a more vulnerable target for victimization than does just being a minority member.

There is considerable evidence that immigrants suffer higher rates of victimization than autochthons for both violent and certain property crime. They also suffer other types of victimization, including theft of wages, fraud, labor and housing violations, economic exploitation, trafficking in humans, and hate crime. In terms of common crimes of violence and property crimes, immigrants are more likely to be victimized by their own people than by autochtons. This varies, however, depending on the type of crime and the gender of the victim. The patterns of victimization fit well with opportunity and conflict theories. Immigrants are suitable targets who are accessible and often have no guardians—unless they are living in enclaves. The vulnerability of immigrants who are illegal is even greater. The fact that a person is a foreigner and/or has ethnic characteristics that make him or her seem “foreign” incites some people to hate crime. Immigrants living in close proximity to high-crime-risk areas are more likely to be victimized. In general, the same socio demographic characteristics associated with being a criminal are associated with being a victim of crime.

Body: Discussion and Analysis

Immigrants have been found to be at higher risks than autochthons of being the victims of homicide in Australia and in the United States. Australian homicide victimization rates for various immigrant groups, calculated as age—sex standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) using the Australian-born rate as the standard, show that male SMRs ranged from 0.13 for immigrants from Africa and the Americas to 5.83 for Koreans.

California death certificates show that among residents who died of homicide in the 1990s, foreign-born persons were overrepresented. Risk rates varied by ethnicity and across time. Foreign-born Whites, Hispanics, and Asians were at significantly higher risk, while foreign-born Blacks were at a statistically similar risk of homicide compared with their U.S.-born counterparts.

Using 1999 Italian data, Marzio Barbagli distinguished between immigrants from developed and those from developing countries, and he calculated the risk of victimization for these two groupings compared to the risk for Italians (Italian = 1). Immigrants from developing countries had risks that were higher than both Italians and immigrants from rich countries for six crimes ...