UCI researchers are awarded Department of Justice grant to study immigration and crime

John Hipp and Charis Kubrin, both professors of criminology, law & society, and Emily Owens, associate professor of criminology, law & society, have been awarded a two-year, $700,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to determine the ways in which immigration and crime are related. Using a decade of data, they’ll conduct analyses that take into account significant differences among immigrants, including why and where they migrate, race, ethnicity, assimilation levels and the effect of local government policies. “We’re interested in understanding how that variability, diversity, nuance and richness may impact the baseline immigration-crime relationship we’ve documented in previous research,” Kubrin said. “We have little understanding of how that broader context conditions the immigration-crime relationship.”