Immigrant Concentration and Homicide Mortality: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis of the Effects of Ethnic Enclaves

This project will investigate the effects of immigrant enclave neighborhoods on patterns of homicide in Los Angeles County. After statistically controlling for neighborhood structural factors related to poverty, employment, age and family composition that are commonly associated with an increased number of homicides in neighborhoods, this study will isolate the effect of neighborhood immigrant concentration on rates of lethal violence. This study will rely on several statistical and analytic improvements on the existing body of research to measure the magnitude of the association between neighborhood counts of homicide and the location of immigrant enclaves. The study will rely on publicly available geo-coded death registration data from years 1996 to 2004 from which homicide caused deaths have been extracted. The study also will explore how different novel approaches to measuring immigrant enclaves affect estimates of the cross sectional and longitudinal link between immigrant concentration and neighborhood rates of homicide. And this study will incorporate measures of the spatial relationships between neighborhoods so that estimates of the link between homicide rates and immigrant enclaves are not confounded by spatial autocorrelation.ca/ncf