Exploring sources of heterogeneity in immigrant crime: Evidence from Norway

Abstract

Evidence from prior research indicates that, in many European countries, immigrants tend to be overrepresented in official crime statistics. Most of these studies treat immigrants as a single category, ignoring considerable differences in the characteristics of this population aggregate. To better understand the nature of immigrant crime, our research explores variation in registered criminal offending across two characteristics that have been relatively neglected in previous work: the immigrants’ cultural backgrounds and their reasons to migrate. The analysis uses population-wide microdata from Norwegian administrative sources and considers both violent and total offending rates for men and women separately. Results show that, net of controls for age, employment, and other sociodemographic factors, immigrant men from environments that differ culturally the most from Norway in terms of Survival versus Self-Expression values have increased rates of registered criminal involvement. Rates are also higher for refugees and family members of refugees, but the relative ranking of groups that have migrated for various reasons differs between men and women and between total and violent offending. Our results are consistent with processes to be expected based on social control, anomie/strain, and labelling perspectives, suggesting fruitful avenues of inquiry for future research on the relationships between immigrant background and registered offending.