Exploring deportation as a causal mechanism of social disorganization

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, immigration control policies have been increasingly punitive and implemented with the aim to ease deportation. Some of these policies have been premised on a supposed link between immigration and crime. Social disorganization is the dominant theory linking immigration and crime. Yet recent criminological scholarship has challenged social disorganization's position that immigrant can lead to factors which cause high crime rates. The immigrant revitalization perspective has emerged as a refutation of social disorganization, suggesting that the social capital and integration fostered in communities resulting from immigration counteract social disorganization theory and actually reduce, rather than increase, crime (Lee and Martinez, Sociol Focus, 35:365-385, 2002). This finding is consistent with existing social science literature, which finds that neighborhoods with high numbers of immigrants are highly cohesive and integrated. If, as the recent criminological studies have found, immigration actually reduces, rather than increases, crime, then it is possible that another mechanism within the immigrant experience leads to social disorganization. Perhaps deportation, which has been documented as having the very same effects social disorganization says leads to increased crime rates, should be examined. Instead of immigration, it is rather immigration control that promotes and creates that which it seeks to curb: crime.