Immigrant Crime
The Second Generation
Kevin J. Mullen
Underlying the ongoing French urban riots is a phenomenon which can be found in immigrant disorders in any age: second generation violence. Just about every study of American immigration in the last century has concluded that most groups of first generation newcomers are less criminally violent than native born Americans. The same cannot be said, however, for the American-born sons of the newcomers.
According to Roger Lane, a respected historian of 19th century violence, the pre-Civil War era was “the most disorderly and bloodiest in our history.” Much of the violence in that period—that in the urban East at least--can be traced to the Irish newcomer community.
The San Francisco version of those disorders resulted in the expulsion by an extralegal Vigilance Committee of a group of Irish-named thugs under threat of execution should they return. It was not first generation recent famine Irish immigrants who were causing the trouble here or elsewhere, but the sons of earlier immigrants from the 1820s and 30s.
A couple of decades later San Francisco in the 1870s was plagued by groups of young Irish-surnamed thugs whose conduct provided a most useful term to the nation’s socio/criminal lexicon: “hoodlum.” Again the ranks of the young gangsters were not drawn directly from the first generation immigrants but chiefly from among their children. According to one student of criminal violence, Irish newcomers in the 1870s had higher levels of violence than was found among African-Americans in the 1960s.
The international image of Prohibition-era Italian-American gangsterdom is personified to this day in Al Capone, born notably in Brooklyn, New York, of Italian immigrant parents. And other well-known ethnic gangsters of the period, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Owney Madden, while technically born in the old country, were brought to the U.S. as small children and effectively raised as Americans.
Similarly, the Second Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West took place in large part during the 1940s. Yet it was twenty years later in the late 1960s and 1970s that rates of criminal violence soared, fueled in large part by the depredations of the sons of that great migration. During the same period, American cities burned in a series of urban riots.
One explanation for the high rates of second generation criminal violence lies in the cultural divide between the parents’ old country values and the attractions of the new society to their half-assimilated children. It is a phenomenon observed by just about everyone who has studied youth immigrant delinquency, from Frederick Thrasher, through Oscar Handlin, and down to observers of youth crime today. The same phenomenon helps to explain why the children of immigrant groups look for “family” in ethnic street gangs.
In the end, the earlier social scourges passed away. In 1877 San Francisco was treated to several days of hoodlum riots which were brought to an end only after a 5000 man “Pickhandle Brigade,” so called because of the weapons with which they were equipped, was organized to quell the disaster. Thereafter, the severely understaffed police department was trebled in size, district stations were established on the home turf of the hoodlum gangs and patrol wagon/callbox systems were installed which would allow the immediate dispatch of the large numbers of officers to the scene of riots.
At the same time, reports Roger Lane, the Irish “once infamous for their violence, over the late nineteenth century went to parochial school, got their knuckles rapped when they got rambunctious, and graduated into jobs and factories, office, and most famously the civil service. . .” resulting in a consequent reduction in criminal violence.
Another factor to be considered to explain the decline of violence is the numerical reduction in the immigrant community. Italian-American crime declined in the early middle decades of the 20th century following a drastic reduction in immigration during World War I and restrictions on immigration enacted in 1924 legislation. Over the following decades the immigrant groups from an earlier time assimilated into the larger community resulting in the most peaceable period in the nation’s history.
The disorders of the 1970s were met with massive federal programs which attempted to improve criminal justice services and enactments to increase minority employment in the job market, a process which many claim is as yet incomplete.
Now we are experiencing yet another mass immigration – the largest in the nation’s history – this time across the southern border from Mexico and Central America. It’s too early to tell, but it will be interesting to see how history plays itself out as the second generation comes of age.
Will the immigrant population stabilize and its members fully assimilate? Or will TV viewers a couple of decades hence watch as again our cities burn?